July 14, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:37:42
3023 The Role of Men as Providers - Call In Show - July 11th, 2015
Question 1: I’m a former entrepreneur who is currently a stay at home father while my wife earns a living. I’m feeling increasingly frustrated, am generally unhappy and my self-confidence has fallen to the point where I don’t know if I could run a successful business even if the opportunity presented itself. Do you have any thoughts on my wife and I can improve my happiness?Question 2: I was fired from my job of nine years and since then I've been going from one low paying entry-level job to another. I have a useless degree, recently turned thirty and I feel like I'm stuck. How can I improve my situation?Question 3: Given that socially funded research is demonstrably the best method for advancing technology and technology is the leading factor in improving the overall standard of living, how could removing the state not be viewed as detrimental to the progression of mankind?Question 4: I recently started dating a women who I think will be a good parent for various reasons, but I ran into some potential red flags that I think may become problematic during post-child rearing phase of life. What do you think is a good approach for drawing the line between satisfying own desires vs. satisfying the evolutionary biological imperative of creating more smarter and peaceful generation of kids?
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And working on part three of Gene Wars, which is Gene Simmons versus Gene Roddenberry.
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Cage match of Tongue versus Star Trek.
So, hope you're having a wonderful evening, Mike.
Let's get to the listeners before I continue and completely drive the map.
Alright, well up for us today, it's Hannah and Richard.
Richard's the one that wrote in and said, I'm a New Zealander living in the Netherlands.
I'm married, my wife is Dutch, and we have a two-year-old daughter and another child arriving soon.
I had my own business in New Zealand, which had failed, and I moved to the Netherlands with the hope of starting a new business and building a new life.
Rather foolishly, I underestimated the difficulty one faces in a country that not only has a different language, but also a different attitude towards business.
I found the language particularly difficult to overcome as I'm dyslexic.
I've tried a number of ways to get back into a business, but over time my self-confidence has waned to such a point that even if an opportunity presented itself, I'm not sure if I could take it on.
Over the last two years, I've been a stay-at-home dad, which I feel very privileged to be able to do, and spare my daughter the outsourced daycare upbringing that is the unquestioned norm here in the Netherlands.
Despite having a comfortable life, I feel unfulfilled.
My wife, who is self-employed in the language and communications field, is doing very well in progressively building a solid career.
She has a close-knit family and friends and enjoys life here.
I, on the other hand, seem to be constantly clashing with the social norms and socialist system which I feel increasingly alienated from and is a constant source of aggravation.
Both me and my wife have discussed my unhappiness with the current situation at length And we had tried for some years to figure out an agreeable solution for us and our children in the future.
Unfortunately, these plans had not been working out, and it's led me to become more and more frustrated.
And so it is at this point that I am seeking your advice.
Should I just drag my wife to the other side of the world so I can fulfill my manly need to be the provider?
Or find a more amicable agreement?
To what extent does your external environment, attitudes, culture, and language impact one's well-being?
And presuming that it does, is it justified to break the security and family bond of one partner in order to hopefully satisfy the needs of the other?
That's from Richard, and both Richard and Hannah are on the line.
Well, welcome guys.
Thanks a lot for calling in.
I hope that I can throw a few nuggets of utility your way.
Hi there.
Hi.
Hello.
Hi.
You guys, obviously, both of you and all that.
So, well, congratulations.
How long until the new arrival to the family?
The second one is due end of September.
End of September.
Okay.
Well, if you can push them out on September 24th, They will share the birthday with at least one person who's on this call.
Let me see who that might be.
Anyway.
That's actually my due date, yeah.
Is it September 24th?
It is.
Excellent.
Well, obviously jumping jacks, copious amounts of sex, prune juice, holding in sneezes.
I'm not a doctor, but something like that on September 24th would be excellent.
So important.
You know what was funny to me at least is that, I don't know if it's the same in the Netherlands, but I think it was in England when I was growing up, but certainly here in Canada, going Dutch is when the woman pays.
Well, I think it's here that, well, you split, right?
Normally it's split, yeah.
Yeah, it's split, going Dutch, yeah.
Going Dutch, yeah.
So, How happy are you with your husband's parenting?
Very happy.
He's a very good dad.
He's a very good father.
And Hannah, how happy do you feel being, or does it matter, do you have any particular feelings, strongly positive or negative, about being the provider?
Well, that's a difficult one.
I sort of don't...
I got used to being the provider.
The thing is not so much being the provider, it's more that he is not happy.
Yeah, he's not happy.
No, but just about the provider thing?
Well, I prefer to be more equal.
You prefer to be...
So you prefer it if you both equally contributed financially and then you both equally contributed from a parenting standpoint?
Because I assume he's providing more parenting because you're providing more money?
Exactly, yeah.
I think that would be better.
Yeah.
Right.
And if that's not going to happen, so would you then cut back on your hours so that you would be able to do more parenting?
If that would mean that he could do something that's purposeful for him?
Well, hang on, sorry, just a sec, because I sort of want to differentiate stuff that you would prefer independent of his preferences at the moment, if that makes sense.
No, can you say it again?
Sorry.
Because if you say, well, I'd like things to be more equal, because that would make Richard happier, right?
Yeah, well...
That's not the same as something you would want, because that would be to solve a problem?
Yeah, well, it would make me very happy if he would be more happy.
No, no, no, I get that.
But I'm trying to figure out what you would want independent of...
I'm not saying you don't care about his happiness.
But if I say, well, listen, I'm going to go to Tahiti, right?
And you'd say, wow, that sounds like a great vacation.
And I'd say, no, I'm going to Tahiti because my father who lives there is very ill.
Then it would no longer be...
I'd be there to solve a problem.
The motivations for the two are very different, right?
Yeah.
So if he was happy, if he was perfectly happy, well, I mean, that's a ridiculous phrase.
Nobody in general ever achieves that state more than, I don't know, orgasm.
But if he was really happy, if he was content, if he was not anxious, if he was not unfulfilled, but was fulfilled in his current role, would you still prefer it then if you got more parenting and he contributed more income?
Yeah.
In that case, if he would be really happy with the situation as it is now, then I would have no problem with continuing on the way it is.
And the way it is, maybe that's good to explain, is that I'm away three days a week.
Well, four days basically.
And then I work in evening hours or when the child sleeps.
So we also spend quite some time together.
So I like that setup for myself.
Right.
So the problem you're trying to solve...
Is not say that you'd like to be...
I'm not saying this sounds bad.
The problem, Hannah, that you're trying to solve from your perspective is how to make Richard happier, not how to solve a problem that's to do with your perspective.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Okay.
So if we can make Richard happier, then that's all that needs to change for your happiness to increase significantly, right?
Exactly.
Okay.
That's important.
I mean, that's because we need to know sort of what problem we're trying to solve here.
So, Richard.
Yes.
Richard, Richard, Richard.
Have you looked into the biological consequences of fatherhood, particularly proximity to children?
Well, only what I've learned from your program.
And the reason I'm saying this is that you said that you're sort of feeling less confident, less motivated, more insecure, right?
Now, there is...
This isn't the whole story, of course, right?
But it's important to know that you are 40%, at least 40% down in your testosterone since becoming a father.
And it's probably much higher because a man loses about 40% of his testosterone just by becoming a father.
But the more time you spend around babies and toddlers, the more testosterone you lose.
To give you a concrete example, have you heard me scream in a show lately?
Can't say I have, no.
But if some of my earlier podcasts say before I became a father, you could say a little more high-strung, a little more aggressive, right?
I mean, I'm a pretty high-testosterone guy, which is why my forehead freckles are exposed to the sun, moon, and stars.
But I have lost a lot of testosterone.
I'm probably down 50% or 60% testosterone just by being a stay-at-home dad.
Yes, but this problem has been here for quite some time.
Longer than my child's two now.
And it was before that.
Oh, no, I'm not saying this is the whole thing.
Honestly, I'm not just saying you're down on testosterone, you're pretty much the lead singer of yes, and therefore...
I'm not trying to say this is the only issue.
I'm just making sure that you guys are aware of that.
And the reason, of course, the reason for that is that we want testosterone to go out and get the resources that allow us to start a family...
And then we need to cool it on the testosterone because we have the family and we don't want to strangle the children, right?
So good to be aggressive before you have kids.
Not so great to be as aggressive after you have kids.
I just wanted to mention that.
Hannah, does this accord with anything that you've seen?
Does he seem less oomphy?
I don't know what exactly you should call testosterone, but competitive or aggressive or anything like that?
Well, in a way, I feel that he got...
When we had our child, he got increasingly frustrated that he couldn't be...
Take on the role or be a provider as he wanted to be.
So he actually was, as a result, more angry.
I feel.
And there is a...
I have no idea what the biology behind it is, but it's a fairly well-known phenomenon that men start working harder after they have children.
There are two times when a man's income goes up significantly.
Number one, when he gets married, and number two, when he has children.
And it's not like society as a whole says, yeah, you're married, let's give you a raise.
It's just that men tend to buckle down and work harder when they get married, and then even harder when they...
And so, yeah, nature takes away your testosterone and then demands that you work harder.
Because, I don't know, it's just cruel.
So I imagine that he would have had some pretty basic urge and instinct to go out and start providing when you guys had your first kid, your daughter, right?
Yeah.
And so, again, these aren't...
The solutions to the problem, this is just sort of a bit of background about all of this.
And, you know, of course, I'm just some guy on the internet, so be sure to research all of this.
But that's an important background, just so you don't take it entirely as in your head, right?
It's also in your hormones.
It's in your genetics.
It's in your spinal fluid.
I don't know.
It's in your balls.
Like, it's in...
It's in you, which is important to know, just in terms of what you're dealing with.
Like, you know, if a woman starts going through menopause, she doesn't just say, wow, I'm weirdly sweaty and moody, right?
I mean, it's like, okay, there's stuff that's occurring, and it's not the whole story, but it's important, biological underpinning.
So I just wanted to mention that before we go further.
We can't really talk about that because it's just nature, right?
But it's important to know as a whole.
Now, Hannah, how do you feel about going to New Zealand?
I mean, I get it.
They're a hobbit.
But other than the hobbits, how do you feel about going to New Zealand?
Because that's the fundamental question, right?
Yeah.
Well, I just really don't want to go now, to be honest with you.
Yeah.
Should we talk again in winter when it's cold?
No, I'm just kidding.
Okay, so you don't want to go to New Zealand, right?
Well, I think that I could...
You know, when we met, so that's like eight years ago, the initial plan was that I would move to New Zealand.
And then Richard, he had a business...
Didn't work out, that business.
So then he decided to come here.
And at that point, I wouldn't have had a problem going there.
And for years after that, Richard was, well, not so happy that the business didn't work out well.
That's from my perspective, of course.
And so he didn't really want to go to New Zealand, well, for years.
But once...
Well, we had children.
He felt like, oh, maybe he would be a better option.
Whereas at that point, for me, well, I guess that's also hormones, that I want to be in a place where I feel very comfortable, where I feel completely other side of the world now.
It makes me feel, well, sort of like I always feel like I'm joking, you know?
I can't stand the thought.
And maybe it's different in 10 years.
Well, yeah, in 10 years.
Okay.
Now, for what it's worth, I want to be upfront with my particular perspective, and then we can talk about ways to achieve it.
I think that New Zealand is not a good idea.
I mean, just looking at it practically, and Richard, I'm not trying to say, and therefore, suck it up.
We've got to find something that's better than that.
But just looking at it from the outside, which doesn't mean accurately, I'm just telling you my perspective, but you have a good income right now.
Hannah, you have a stable career.
Well, you're self-employed, right?
So you've got a pretty stable career and you have family, right?
I mean, I assume, Hannah, that you...
Like your family, right?
Otherwise, you'd probably think New Zealand would be fine, right?
So you like your family, and they're heavily bound up in your daughter's life, and they're going to be heavily bound up in your new child's life, and you have a support system, a network.
Hannah, do you have friends?
Of course you have friends, but do you have friends who are also going through parenthood in any kind of similar situation?
Yeah, a lot of them actually are my friends, and well, let's say that I've got Ten girlfriends or so who are now going through the same phase.
And yeah, we are closely in touch.
And also I've got two brothers who are more or less the same as here.
And yeah, we see each other a lot.
I see my mom maybe every second week.
Right.
Yeah, now, look, family, friends, people going through the same situation, that's important, right?
Raising kids without a support system is tough, is tough.
And so I would, in terms of what's best for the kid, in terms of what's best for the family as a whole, and certainly what's preferable to you in the moment, Hannah, staying where you are for the foreseeable future, I mean, if you go to New Zealand, you may not have a support system.
It may take a while to develop or reconnect to that support system.
Hannah, you may not be able to work.
It may take you a while to get a job.
Right, Richard, you don't know what you might do, whether you'll be successful, whether you won't be successful, and so on.
So the weather's nicer in some ways, but there is a significant amount of risk.
And I am always cautious...
About moving children.
Children like a certain amount of structure and security, predictability.
Heaven forbid I change the background on a tablet that my daughter uses.
Dad, what happened to my background?
I changed it.
I like new eye candy from time to time.
Well, I'm afraid you'll have to change it back.
You know how I like the same things, right?
And that could just be my daughter, but I know when I was a kid, I liked that kind of structure as well, that kind of predictability.
And I mean, it would take, I imagine, at least six to 12 months to arrange all of this.
So by that time, you know, you've got a one-year-old, you've got a three, three-and-a-half-year-old, they've got relationships with people, and they've got a rhythm, they've got a routine.
I mean, just the childhood home.
You know, adults move places, and it's like a snail shedding a shell.
But for kids, your childhood home is like, that's the universe.
It's like, hey, want to go to Neptune?
No, because this is the thing.
And so it would be a big uprooting for the kids, and it would be very disorienting for them.
And what would await them in New Zealand would be a giant unknown, as would await your finances, your support system, your social network, your...
Prospects, you know, the whole thing, right?
And it could be a big disaster, right?
Insofar as you go to New Zealand, things don't work out, you end up coming back, and then, Hannah, you have to reestablish your career and, you know, whatever, right?
So, obviously, I'm telling you guys stuff you've already thought about a million times.
I just wanted to sort of get it off my chest.
So, the question then becomes, if staying, and again, this is a big if, right?
But if staying...
Like, where you are is the best thing for the family, then the question becomes, how does it also become the best thing for Richard?
Because, you know, martyrs don't make families stronger, right?
I mean, that, oh, fine, I'll give up my hopes, dreams, and ambitions for the sake of my wife and my children.
Like, that's not, right?
That's not what you want to teach your kids.
It's not how you want to run your family, and it's not going to make anyone happy in the long run.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So you're doomed.
No, I'm kidding.
Doomed if you do.
So you see, if you go to New Zealand, doom, risk, and danger.
If you stay, depression, risk, and danger.
Anyway.
So the challenge then becomes how can we make it more of a win-win, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Because this is where we got to with that.
So am I sort of on the mark so far as far as the parameters?
I mean, I hope I'm not way off base in sort of what I'm talking about so far.
No, no.
You're right on, Mark.
That's basically what we've got to, and this is the dilemma that I find myself in.
Okay, good.
So far, it's been completely redundant, but of course, we have other people who'll end up listening to this.
So then the question becomes, what is the structure of the next couple of years look like?
Hannah, are you breastfeeding?
Is that the plan?
I mean, how is it going to work with you being gone three days a week?
I assume you get like...
You know, it's the Netherlands, so I assume 19 and a half years of mat leave at about $500,000 a year.
Well, unfortunately, it's not like that.
But I have a couple months off.
I will be breastfeeding, and when I'm at work on projects, then I'll just express there and take it home.
So yeah, with my first one, I breastfed for nine months, I think.
Or 11, even.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So she stopped drinking.
Yeah.
So yeah, so that will just continue on.
Okay.
So I've heard two is quite a bit of work.
My wife and I only have one.
There's a huge bulge of work in the toddler years and then it gets a little bit easier in the latency period.
From sort of like 4 or 5 to about 10 or 11 because, you know, I can play with each other and all that.
But I've heard it's quite a hump of work.
So having a second child is probably in some ways as big a change as having a first child.
And I think we all know what a change that could be, right?
I mean, suddenly you're not orbiting each other, you're orbiting this child.
And so I certainly wouldn't recommend making any changes or planning on making any changes for the first year of, you know, from September 24th of this year until September 24th of next year or whatever.
Just because you're going to need to get time to adjust and I think you want to minimize the amount of massive changes in your life at any particular time.
So, to turn to Richard, I guess the question for me is, what is your motivation for wanting to make money?
Because Hannah doesn't need it.
Hannah doesn't need it, right?
I have to go with honesty 101 here.
Hannah's fine without it, as long as you're fine without it.
Again, Hannah, that was my understanding.
Tell me if I'm off base.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay, so you've got a great sugar mama here, right there, right?
I mean, she's just raining money on you and you get to play with kids, right?
So in some ways, not a bad thing, right?
I mean, it's not like she's got you chained to a crib and is feeding you a steady diet of beef jerky and VCR. So you have the capacity to be in an enjoyable situation, but you're not.
So then the challenge is, If Hanna doesn't want you to make money, I assume you don't need the money, like you're living in a cardboard box, then the question is why do you want to make the money?
Well, I guess there's an instinct that I want to provide.
But secondly, I suppose there's some sort of identity, feeling of identity to be able to actually have your own income and be able to You know, spend it the way you wish to or something.
I always feel very guilty now that I only spend, you know, what I'm allowed, sort of allowance only on things that are for the family and, you know, I don't really go out.
Wait, hang on, hang on, hang on, sorry.
Okay, well, sorry, just before, I don't want to, I hate to interrupt, but I always, it's not because I'm trying to be rude, it's just because people say a lot of stuff and I don't, A, don't want to forget it and B, I want to deal with it sort of sequence by sequence.
So the first thing that you said is that you'd like to be providing?
Yeah, well, I have a sense that I should be providing, yeah.
Okay, but now, clearly and objectively, and Hannah, please back me up on this.
Richard, you are providing.
You're providing parenthood.
Yes.
You are the primary caregiver, at least, well, when Hannah's away, right?
So, the idea that you're not providing is false.
You are providing.
And you're providing a service that is irreplaceable, because she doesn't have, like your daughter and the child-to-be, that they're not going to have other fathers, right?
Sure.
So you are providing, right?
Right now.
I'm a stay-at-home dad, too.
And I have been providing.
Because, I mean, obviously, I assume daycare is heavily subsidized that way you are, but it's not great for toddlers and babies at all, right?
I mean, as we've talked about in the show many times, if a baby is more than 20 hours a week in daycare, they have exactly the same symptoms as if they've been completely abandoned by their parents, right?
I mean, it's really not good.
So you are providing now, and also what you're doing is you're laying the foundation In the here and now of a peaceful and productive and happy teenage year set with your kids, right?
Because, you know, you can impose will on kids when they're little because, well, they're little, right?
So they have to eventually pretty much do what you say.
But, man, when they get older, they, you know, the tables really turn.
And what you're doing right now is you're building up a bond and a relationship and a love and a trust with your...
I'm just going to say kids.
I know one's currently in the oven, but that dinger's going to go off fairly soon.
So you're building that relationship with your kids that are going to make their teenage years a lot easier.
Just very, very briefly, I was in the post office the other day.
And a guy came in.
He said, my daughter was with me, and he said, oh, I love that age, man.
I love that age.
My daughter's now 14, right?
And I said, oh, but, you know, as far as I understand it, you know, 14-year-old girls are, like, charming and easy to get along with and all that.
And he laughed.
And, you know, I'm always a bit nervous about talking with some parents or, you know, just because you're like, please don't open your whole vacuum pack box of crazy on my head right now.
But anyway, so he said...
He said, oh no, she's pretty good, actually.
She's pretty good.
I mean, she's pretty good for a 14-year-old.
It's her 19-year-old boyfriend I have problems with.
Now, I'm pretty certain, guys, that what you're doing right now is not going to have you, you know, in 12 or 14 years, having that conversation with some guy in a post office, right?
So, you are...
You are contributing and you're laying the foundation.
You know, again, I've told this story before.
I'll keep it very brief.
But there's a prison psychologist who's talked about how, you know, there's some inmate, right?
And the parents, you know, dutifully take three hours of bus rides every weekend to come up and spend an hour or two with the son and they write letters and they petition lawyers and they just pour dozens of hours a week into this hellscape of a familial situation.
And, you know, the prison psychiatrist always wants to say, why now?
Like, why now?
Why didn't you spend this amount of time when he was younger?
Because then he probably wouldn't have ended up in this situation.
Now, I understand.
It's not like if you go to New Zealand, you'll end up with two serial killers.
I'm not trying to say that.
But what I am saying is that the investment that you're taking now, and in particular, the first investment Four or five years is like 90% of the brain growth and personality development and all that kind of stuff, right?
So after that, you know, you can dangle them off bridges or whatever.
But like the first couple of years is so important.
I mean, my job as a parent, largely done.
Right?
I mean, largely done.
And, you know, maybe a bit of sanding some rough edges, maybe a little whatever, right?
But it's either going to be smooth or rough sailing from here.
for the most part and the investment that Richard, and again, I'm sorry, Hannah, I don't mean to exclude you from parenting, but Richard is the guy who says, I'd like to contribute, right?
So, Richard, the contributions that you're making now is familial happiness for the next 50 or 60 years.
Like, negotiation, peace, ease of mind.
I assume you're taking some peaceful parenting approach, and you, of course, correct me if that's not the case.
But the foundation that you're laying now is the foundation of a happy family.
For the next 50 or 60 years.
Also it's laying the foundation for your grandchildren's epigenetics and their peace of mind.
So the contribution you're making not just to your family but to your entire gene pool and society as a whole is as huge as can possibly be imagined.
Yes, well, I understand that.
But you're unfulfilled.
Personally, there's some unfulfilledness.
Okay, I am changing the world two souls at a time.
I am shaping entire human lives to become better and joyful and happier and more positive, productive members of society.
But on the other hand, you know, some after-tax money would be great.
Well, yes.
And I also look at the society around me and I see, you know, just this mayhem of people sending their kids to creche for three days, four days a week.
I mean, this is...
To what?
Sorry, I see this happening around me.
No, sending them to what?
Kresh?
Kresh?
What was that?
What's that word?
Daycare?
Sorry, it's my accent.
Kresh.
Oh, okay, sorry, sorry.
But sending them to daycare, is that right?
Daycare, daycare, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I'm quite...
I comment on this sometimes, and I mean, this just gets me ostracized.
Right.
No, I get it.
I understand, right?
I mean, if you're raising your kids in a particular kind of way, you go to bed knowing that all...
I mean, I don't think this is the case as much in the Netherlands, but, you know, out here in Canada, I mean, I go to bed at night knowing that in the neighborhood there's lots of spanking and yelling and timeouts and sent to bed without dinners and, right, we've got this whole little row of Gestapo houses.
I mean, it's statistically, right?
I mean, not...
Not the parents we're friends with, but statistically that's going to be the case, right?
I don't know what that has to do with your discontent.
And again, I'm not saying that you don't care about these other kids and all that, but I can't enjoy a meal because there are starving kids in India.
It doesn't give the Indian kids any food, but it sure makes me feel hungry, right?
It's just, hey, look, there's one more hungry person because somebody's upset about hungry people.
So you can of course richly enjoy your relationship with your children despite the fact that people are parenting badly because otherwise the bad parenting spreads to you and your kids lose and it's not like it makes the other parents better.
Tempting you with despair about society as a whole is a way of killing the seeds of happiness in the hearts of good people.
Yeah, but unfortunately my child has to grow up in this environment.
This environment is you.
Forget the rest of the world.
I mean, forget the rest of the world.
But she does have to go outside my environment at some point.
And I know that hopefully I've laid a good foundation, but there's another world out there.
Right.
But that world is not Zimbabwe.
Right?
I mean, you're in the Netherlands, which is It's not savagery out there.
I mean, I've been.
It's pretty nice.
Right?
I mean, of all the times and all the places in human history, to have a kid, you know, you kind of hit the jackpot, right?
Well, it depends from which perspective you're looking at.
All right.
Which perspective would you be looking at?
Well, as in that, I think it's a bit like living in a Yeah, the candy factory.
The government is providing everything.
You get your quota of lollies every day as long as you are complicit to the system.
Okay, a couple of points about that.
Number one, you could say live in colonial America, which had no income tax, but smallpox, diphtheria, typhus, Right?
Polio.
You'd just be worried about...
Are you concerned that your child is going to grow up in a heavily socialized environment?
Yeah.
And I know that's not ideal.
That's not great.
You know, I gotta say, I still choose that over smallpox.
Sure.
Or wild animals with rabies or starvation or...
A civil war or whatever, right?
I mean, so they have intellectual and moral battles to fight, which is great.
It's better than a saber-toothed tiger.
Would you agree?
Yes, yes.
The second point I want to make, and I'll shut up after this because I don't want to keep talking over you, but the second point I'd make, Richard, is who's to say that your kids aren't going to relish the combat?
Well, yeah, who's to say that?
Who's to say?
You know, I mean, to take it, it's a silly analogy, and it probably completely defeats what I'm saying, but I'll say it anyway, which is, you know, oh, you know, there's war in the world.
It's like, maybe your kid really wants to be a mercenary, and is completely overjoyed that there's war in the world, right?
But what I'm saying is, yes, so your children are going to grow up, and there's going to be Moral challenges and it's going to require moral courage and they're going to have to do, hopefully they're going to want to do good in the world and take on bad people and promote virtue.
But maybe they'll love that.
Maybe that's part of their nature, you know?
I don't know if Vikings came from New Zealand, but probably far enough back or somewhere in the gene pool there's Vikings.
And maybe this kind of combat is going to...
It's going to energize them.
Maybe they'd be happier.
Maybe they're happier being born into a time of moral challenge and combat and stimulation than, I don't know, in the Eloi-based future of infinite contentment.
It's just a possibility.
I mean, we don't know, right?
If your kids are, you know, born warriors, then living in a time of this particular kind of combat might be great for them.
We don't know.
You don't know for sure.
Sure.
Well, that's if the schooling system doesn't remove any sense of worry-ship out of them.
Do you have to send them?
Well, this is also a big bone of contention because basically, by a certain age, you have to have your child enrolled into a school.
Or you have to state that you're going to homeschool your children.
Now, if you don't want to homeschool or if you don't state that you're going to homeschool, basically you've got that one chance.
Otherwise, that's it.
You can't decide after two years, oh, I'm going to homeschool them.
You've got to start right from start.
Okay, so you can homeschool.
It's not Germany, right?
In Germany, you can't even do that.
There were some political refugees in America who tried to escape the German schooling system, but you can, right?
I mean, there's some places where you can't, right?
Sure.
Yeah, I know, like Sweden, etc.
It's also the same.
But I mean, those rules, that's happening here.
Basically, it's been tried.
They've tried to ban it, and it's getting closer and closer.
But that's something that, for Hannah, is completely She doesn't want to do that.
Schooling was fine.
Anna, is that right?
You don't want to homeschool the kids?
Or you don't want the kids to be homeschooled?
Well, based on my knowledge so far, I wouldn't be against school.
If it's a good school and we're actually going to move now to another area and they got some very free schools and I think it also has quite some benefits.
I'm not so opposed to To me, it feels a bit like Richard is a bit...
Because he feels frustrated within himself, he projects that on the world in general.
And I don't feel it's that bad, really.
I mean, obviously, you get a lot of schools that are not good for children and that are sort of factory-based institutions, but it's not necessarily the case.
And I think it also gets quite some benefits.
I mean, our child is a very...
Social child, for instance, and I think it would also be very nice for her to go to school.
Sorry, just to be fair, homeschooling is not an isolation tank.
With homeschooling, you hang out with other families, with other kids, you do collective activities, and you could really argue that it's better socializing.
When you're with kids who sort of have more free-thinking parents or parents willing to think outside the box and you get generally more time to socialize because it's not locked into the little recesses and particular lunches in rows and stuff, right?
It's more sort of organic and spontaneous.
So it's not, you don't have to send your kids to school for them to get.
Quote, socialized.
And in fact, the socialization that goes into school is kind of like the friendships you make in prison.
It's like, okay, well, I have learned some rules, you know, dodge the ships.
But it's not fair to say, I think, well, you know, if they're homeschooled, they're locked at home and they'll never get to interact with other kids and they'll grow up, you know, like Rayman.
So, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, well, maybe it's not like I'm necessarily opposed to it.
I just can't visualize it yet.
I have never met anyone who's homeschooled or anything like that.
I don't know if there's...
I don't see the environment.
Like what you say that you would have other parents or other kids that you hang out with, that would mean that they are also homeschooled.
But that would mean that there's an environment of homeschooling going on.
I haven't encountered it yet.
So that sort of paints my picture.
So if I would meet a lot of people who would do it and I would feel that I would connect with those people, I wouldn't be necessarily opposed to it.
I just don't see it at the moment.
So, I mean, you just need to look it up and you need to go and you can go and meet them now if you want.
And, you know, hopefully they're not a bunch of, I don't know, Amish Quakers or, you know, whatever.
I don't know.
Like, we want to prove to the kids that Jesus rode dinosaurs or whatever.
Right.
I mean, so you just you would just go go look it up and go meet the people.
And that's more of a practical consideration.
And also, I mean, at least the studies in the U.S. is that homeschooled kids generally do better than government schooled kids, as I'm sure we can imagine.
It's certainly more organic.
I mean, kids used to learn from their parents and from their communities.
They didn't go in boxes and rows and passively try to absorb information or whatever.
And in particular, if your next child is a son, again, what do I know about Dutch education?
Nothing at all.
But I do know that it's become very...
Girl positive and not boy positive in in a lot of Western schools and Depending on the gender, right?
I mean particularly for boys I think government schools have just got gotten really really bad I mean I went to a pretty Duty school, right?
When I first started, I was in boarding school, and it was all male.
There was a female boarding school on the other side of the building.
But, you know, it was pretty male.
And I think that actually was not bad in some ways.
Because they kind of understood boys and our need for energy and our need for hands-on learning.
And it wasn't just sort of sitting in rows.
Anyway, neither here nor there.
So that's one possibility, but...
So, let's get back to Richard and this question of contribution.
The idea of being dependent on someone else, it's, you know, like those trust exercises, you know, fall backwards, we'll catch you or whatever, right?
There is this fear of trust sometimes that happens.
Like whenever I read something from a woman who's like, well, you know, I want to have kids, but I want to keep my own career...
And I want to keep my own income.
And if you read long enough, you always find the main reason is, well, what if we get divorced?
I'm gonna need an income, right?
And I'm not saying that's necessarily the case with you guys, but it is, and I get it, it's a very big trust exercise to say to your partner, okay, I eat because you work, and I hope you will continue to like me and drop food into my squawking sparrow baby throat, right?
Because you really are then become very dependent, financially of course, on the other person, but I would argue that Hannah's equally dependent on your quality of fatherhood, right?
Yeah, sure, and I suppose that makes it more difficult that I don't have a support structure here.
I clash with the society quite often here, so I get ostracized from one side.
Is that the case with Hannah's family?
Have they ostracized you or are they holding socialist noses?
I've had some clashes with Hannah's mum and some friends, etc.
Basically, just points of view.
I'm not a socialist-thinking person at all, and I don't like this system of just stealing from people and handing it to others.
Whereas that's the accepted norm, and for most people that's what should happen.
It's not the norm.
It's a virtue, right?
I mean, what they hear from you is, hey, you know what was overlooked historically?
Slavery and eugenics.
You know, I really think we should give those another look, right?
I mean, because from their perspective, that's how crazy it sounds, right?
Yeah.
Sure.
Right.
And that's not about to change, right?
No.
No.
Definitely not.
And, I mean, I've been pretty punchy about, you know, the against me argument and all that, but when it comes to kids, right, I mean, a whole bunch of different factors come into the equation, right?
I mean, insofar as it's one thing for you as an adult to make decisions that influence your social life, but if you're making decisions that influence your children's social lives, that's different, right?
Because, you know, You're then not making decisions.
And you and Hannah can make decisions about those things as adults.
But, you know, if your daughter, I assume, has a strong relationship.
I think, Hannah, you said you see a mom every week or two.
If your daughter has a strong relationship with her grandmother, then I wouldn't argue that you then have the right to, you know, toast that for ideological reasons.
And I'm obviously very committed to ideological reasons, but...
You can go on a diet, but you can't get down on your child's nutritional requirements, if that makes sense.
And when you have a strong social environment that the child is bound into, then challenging or undermining those relationships for the sake of parental belief systems that the child can't possibly understand You know,
like, for instance, if, I'm not saying this is the case, but Hannah, if your mom was, like, hitting your daughter, then you'd say, look, we can't, like, then you'd have, okay, well, we can't, right?
Because we can't expose her to that hitting that, and you could explain that to the daughter, right?
As opposed to, well, we've got this non-aggression principle, and you draw the diagram of the European Union and the Dutch Parliament and the funding mechanisms for public schools, and then she's falling asleep because she's two, right?
And so, you know, I think that that's very incomprehensible to kids, and I think it will make it very traumatic for them to understand that ideology shattered their capacity to see grandma.
I don't think that would make them very pro-philosophy, so to speak.
And so, I would not say that if your children are embedded in a familial environment, that it is particularly good to start whacking at the basis of those relationships with ideological perspectives.
Again, and I know that this sounds like unusual coming from me, but it's different to me if there are kids who are already in relationships.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah.
Yeah.
In the same way, like if you guys were to say, we really want to move to New Zealand, I'd say, well, obviously it's your choice, you're adults, right?
But if you've got kids embedded in familial and social relationships, then it's different because, right, you don't have the right necessarily to just up and move for your own preferences because there's children's needs, right?
Or stability and extended family and all that kind of stuff.
So, Richard, stop picking fights.
I think that's what I'm going to...
Particularly if they're not going to change.
And I assume, Hannah, this is not something that you're goading him to do?
No.
You're not going over saying, you know, Aunt Hungrao Dagmar, she voted socialist once.
I hope you call her out on it.
Right?
Yeah.
I assume that's not like the big number one joy in your social gathering, right?
No.
Please don't mention politics.
Please don't mention politics.
Exactly.
That's how I often go, yeah.
Well, that is the control mechanism, isn't it?
Because now I can't talk basically about, you know, there's a whole list of subjects that I'm not allowed to talk about basically.
Well, no, no, no.
See, but now that's very passive aggressive.
You're allowed to do whatever you want.
You're a free adult, right?
But choices have consequences.
And once, you know, if they're good enough to be around your daughter, right?
If they're good enough people for your daughter to have intimate, loving relationships with, is it really fair to pick at the threads of ideological differences?
Yeah, sure.
You chose to have kids in this family context, right?
Did you say, no, they're a statist.
I must tuck my penis away.
I don't assume that happened at any point.
Although if that did, that would be kind of interesting.
But I'm assuming that it didn't, right?
Down, penis.
Statism is around.
And we all know statism is the ultimate boner killer, right?
I mean...
You decided to marry into and to have children in this environment, right?
And then saying, well, now I'm not allowed to is like completely disowning your past choices that led you to this situation, right?
Yeah, yeah, I know.
And that's true.
I mean, it is passive aggressive.
I will marry your daughter.
I will procreate with your daughter.
And living organisms the size of a watermelon will come out of her hoo-hoo But I really want to fight with you about politics.
Right?
I mean, I don't see how that necessarily follows.
And that seems to me it's going to put you in a situation of significant discontent.
And I can virtually guarantee you, Richard, that this situation of feeling silenced did not originate now, in the here and now.
Is that fair to say?
As a kid, did you feel like you couldn't talk about stuff?
Did you feel that was taboo stuff?
I mean, is this an entirely new situation?
Yes, yes, because as children we've talked about, I never felt that I was...
But maybe it has a link to being dyslexic.
That's the only thing I can think of that suddenly springs up.
Wait, sorry, I just want to make sure I understand.
So as a kid, your family was interested and engaged in discussing even the most challenging and disruptive of topics.
Yeah, religion, sex, all sorts.
If we were to discuss abortion or something, yeah, we debated quite heavily in our family.
And why do you think that you chose such a square family?
Why do you think that you got involved and interested and married into a family that is not that way inclined, particularly?
Well, put it this way.
I didn't critique the family.
I was marrying the family.
What do you mean?
You thought that you were going to marry them and they weren't...
I'm not sure I understand.
Oh, were you hoping to get her to go to New Zealand and therefore family wasn't going to be an issue?
Well...
Maybe I hadn't looked that far down the track, actually.
Alright, let's figure out what you were looking at.
Hannah, can you not have false modesty?
I'm not saying you do, but just for a moment, make sure you have no false modesty.
Hannah, how pretty are you?
I think I'm okay.
Come on, come on.
When a woman says okay, I'm adding three points.
So you're saying oh seven, I'm adding at least two, two and a half points.
Okay.
Okay, give me a one to ten.
At your height.
I mean, look, and I'm not saying that you've deflated into a post-baby beanbag or anything like that now, but when you guys met eight years ago, He sees you on top of a cliff, drenched in the storm of a tsunami of sexy goddessness.
There's lightning behind you.
Diaphanous gowns are slowly blowing off your body, right?
I mean, how, you know, what have we got?
Let's say an eight.
Eight?
And Richard, what would you estimate this says?
Sahana?
Yeah.
Nine, eight.
Now, understand, this is a Dutch heritage nine.
One of my first girlfriends was a Dutch woman.
Y'all are pretty glorious specimens.
I just want to mention that.
It's like the difference between a New Jersey eight and a Los Angeles eight.
They're like worlds apart.
I don't know if this means anything to you.
You know how you adjust for inflation?
Yeah.
You know, you have to put in the blonde goddess adjustment factor or whatever you want to call it, right?
Because, I mean, Dutch women are glorious to begin with, so an 8 in Dutch circles?
I mean, what would that...
Let me put it this way.
Richard, if Hannah was in New Zealand, would she be an 8?
No, she'd be 9.
Maybe.
I mean, New Zealand's...
I think.
Okay, so we're grading for the curve here, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so very, very attractive, right?
Yeah.
So could this have something to do with the fact that your baby didn't look at the family belief system in any particularly great detail?
Well, I don't doubt that that was an influencing factor, of course.
Right.
Richard, and how handsome are you?
Hmm...
Well, I think I would grade myself as a, I don't know, six or seven.
Six or seven?
Yeah.
Now, is this a Dutch six or seven or a New Zealand six or seven?
I'm a New Zealander, so I'm coming from New Zealand standards.
So, well, I don't know what, I haven't really looked at Dutch men as sexual objects, although I believe there's a website about that.
And Hannah, what would you, like, when you first met Richard, what would you have posted him as?
Oh, definitely a nine.
Richard, what happened?
What happened?
Are you a post-baby beanbag?
I mean, did I entirely talk about the wrong person?
And still...
You're still pulling him at nine?
Yes.
Alright.
Maybe I'm just modest in.
I don't know.
Alright, so would you say that you both looked at each other and you're like, whoa, there's some pretty even features.
We'd have some very even-featured babies.
Because very attractive people, it's like they can find each other across an airplane hangar full of trolls.
It's like there's this radar that goes on.
I genuinely believe that really, really attractive people see the rest of us as highly pixelated images.
We're like Minecraft people.
And then like across the room, like rising, like Venus de Milo, rising are these glorious gods and goddesses of human beauty.
And to the rest of it, these troll-faced people.
It's like we don't even notice the step over our heads to get to each other, right?
So, would you say that, I mean, I'm sure you're very smart people, you've got lots of virtues and so on, and I'm thrilled at the way you're parenting, but is it fair to say that there was kind of a few chemical processes going on at the beginning of things?
Well, as there is always, yeah.
Of course.
Right.
Did you buy a selfie stick on your second date?
That's really my question.
No, eight years ago?
There wasn't no selfie sticks back then.
Anyway.
Good looking couple, right?
I mean, I'm not going to ask for a photo, although, you know, I wouldn't mind.
But what I'm saying is that you're a good looking couple, right?
So you got the good looking couple stuff.
And again, I'm not saying that's the basis, initial attraction, blah, blah, blah.
But did you, I mean, Richard, did you have these philosophical perspectives eight years ago or more recent?
Well, not as strong as this, no.
But you had some, right?
Well, I had...
Not so much.
Yeah, I had some.
Well, not so much.
Okay, so if we take now as 100, I'm not saying it is, but eight years ago, Hannah, what would you say he was at in terms of these commitment to belief systems?
No.
No, not as I remember it at all.
To me, they also started much more strongly, I think, when I got pregnant of our first child, more or less.
Right.
Right.
So what you're saying is he had some what you would consider unusual beliefs when you were younger, but you're like, to hell with it, man.
He's a nine.
Chiseled jaw, abs, right?
Tall, dark, and handsome.
I can take some bubbles of crazy belief systems because, rawr, right?
Yeah.
Because when we're in the throes of erotic attraction, it's not like it's our peak of abstract and objective judgment, right?
Is that fair to say?
He didn't have those beliefs when we met.
You said some, but not as much.
Is that not correct?
Yeah, well, he was very strongly pro-entrepreneurship, but he was not...
Against everything that's going on in the world so much.
Wait, wait, wait.
Come on.
Against everything that's going on in the world?
Well, everything but a lot.
He got last couple years, he's focusing on all the bad things that are going on in the world.
Like, we're going to have a massive economic crisis and there's going to be these and socialists.
Everything is wrong.
It's our sort of thing.
Right.
And that has escalated significantly over the last eight years, right?
Was there any of that before, or was it mostly just entrepreneurial stuff?
Well, then I lived in New Zealand, so I mean, I wasn't exposed so much to the socialist problems, etc.
Yeah, because New Zealand kind of went a little free market heavy, right, over the last sort of 15-20 years, right?
They got rid of all their agricultural subsidies, they liberated some aspects of their market and all that kind of stuff, right?
They did, and I grew up in the middle of that, so I got to appreciate it or see the destruction that it caused for a start, but also the benefit it had as well.
And also I went to private schools and boarding schools as well.
So I grew up very much in this entrepreneurial environment.
My family is entrepreneurial.
Everybody around me runs businesses or is farming and this type of stuff.
Right.
Okay.
So, when would you say that...
You said it was after...
I think, Hannah, you said that for Richard it was after your daughter was born.
So, is that a couple of years...
Two years ago, right?
Yeah, maybe a bit before that.
Maybe when I got pregnant around that period.
And do you know why that happens?
I would say before that, though.
I was looking...
I was...
I mean, when I first came here, I had a very open mind as far as, well, what is this system?
How does it work?
Oh, it's interesting.
They provide for everything.
Oh, that's interesting.
But increasingly, I started seeing, wait a minute, there's great cracks here.
I can start seeing through it.
So it wasn't just a pair at all.
I started then.
Well, I mean, obviously there's a lot of negative sides to the system we got, but then I feel why focus all your energy and all your happiness on a system, you know?
No, look, and I always annoy the hell out of myself, you know, because let's make this conversation about me, right?
But I always annoy myself because I can completely understand where both of you are coming from.
I can completely understand where both of you are coming from.
So, you know, whether it's a man or a woman thing, I don't know, but certainly for me, I have taken the ills of the world much more personally since I became a father, because I see...
Where my daughter's going to have to grow up, right?
What kind of world she's going to have to be.
Like, you know, Richard's time frame, I assume, sort of stretched out more.
I'm not saying yours didn't, Hannah, but Richard's time frame sort of stretches out and, you know, you think about the world that you...
One of the first things he said here was, my daughter's going to have to grow up and live in this world, right?
Mm-hmm.
So, we do have a frantic and fanatical desire to improve the world that our children are going to grow up in.
I don't know whether men have that a little bit more than women, I don't know, right?
But it seems that way.
And the freedoms that we have won, Hannah, right, I'm saying this to you because I get your frustration with Richard, but the freedoms that you enjoy, the freedom to say, have a career, Right?
The freedom to live in a stable society, the freedom to live in a society without imminent war threats and all of that.
And even the society where there's great medicine and so on.
A lot of that stuff has come about because of men like Richard, right?
And they annoyed the shit out of their wives sometimes too with these obsessions.
Does that make sense?
Wait, did she just wander away from the microphone?
Yeah, no, I... Hannah, don't walk out!
I'll start having a point soon, I promise.
No, it's just that it...
How I experience it is that it derives from personal unhappiness and he projects it on the whole world type of thing.
Right.
I get that.
I don't have a problem with questioning, but it comes with so much anger and frustration that it gets a bit difficult to...
Have a proper discussion about it sometimes.
And he wants to talk about it all the time sometimes.
And it just gets a bit, well, annoying.
And he starts having these arguments with everyone around me.
And I'm like, well, you don't have to talk about, you know, socialism every single night with everyone.
It's not compulsory.
Right.
Right.
Now, Richard, would you say that is a fair characterization of...
Your emotional frustration with this and the degree to which you really do want to help enlighten people about these issues.
Well, I think, yeah, it's fair enough.
It's a bit exaggerated, I feel.
From my perspective, I like to debate this stuff, and people just do not debate here.
I don't know if it's just in the Netherlands or if it's just in Hannah's family, but to debate or to challenge each other is sort of like a complete no-no.
And if I do that, I get shut down straight away.
So I get frustrated with this.
Well, hang on.
When you say you get shut down, what does that mean?
People just say, like, I don't want to talk about this?
Well, basically, they just come back with a whole pile of the reticute, the standard sort of non-arguments.
But my roads!
Sorry?
Sorry?
Rhodes!
Healthcare!
Don't you want children to be educated?
Don't you care about the poor?
Yeah, exactly.
And just shut the thing down.
Shut the discussion down.
I'm used to having debate.
You bring up your point and I bring up mine and we challenge each other's ideas.
It's a standard thing.
Maybe it's just my family.
It's not a standard thing if it doesn't happen where you are.
Well, no, I guess that annoys me, so I get frustrated with this.
Okay, okay.
I get it.
I get it.
All right.
So, you are frustrated, Richard, because Dutch people, in your experience, don't respond to reason and evidence, right?
Yeah.
Right.
Are you responding to the reason and evidence...
Or at least to the empirical evidence that Dutch people don't respond to reason and evidence?
No, I'm just sucking it up.
Well, you're rejecting empirical evidence and then you're claiming frustration that people are rejecting empirical evidence, right?
Yeah, I guess I am.
You get this paradox, right?
Yeah, I know.
You're frustrated that other people aren't doing What you are failing to do.
Yeah, yeah.
Look in the mirror.
Exactly.
Alright, so...
Clearly, if you are in an environment where you cannot change people's minds...
Let's take an extreme example.
Let's say you married...
Let's say Hannah, Hannah's family...
She's a very hot bonobo monkey, right?
Very sexy.
Blonde.
Whatever, right?
And her family is composed of, as I'm sure you could imagine, bonobo monkeys, right?
Would you spend a lot of time and energy attempting to convince the bonobo monkey family of the virtues of the free market?
Well, taking it face value now.
No.
And this is obviously a kind of goofy argument, but there isn't, I think, an important kernel of truth.
Now, the reason you wouldn't, I assume, is because you would know ahead of time that it wouldn't do much good to argue with bonobos because they're just going to pick nits off your head, scratch their asses, and go eat some mango, right?
Sure.
So, if you saw someone continuing to attempt to reason with bonobo monkeys, Please understand, Hannah, I'm not comparing you.
Right, I apologize.
So if you saw a man attempting to continue debating, ah, bonobo, but have you heard the bastard argument regarding socialism and how you eventually run out of other people's money, right?
Right?
Good point.
However, I must see your counterexample with Hamina Hamina, right?
And the reason I say this is that if you ever want to see a general clusterfrak of bonobo monkey speak, YouTube comments.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it's basically if human beings could roll the excrement of their mental indigestion into something approximating language and throw it at a computer screen, you'd end up with something...
You know, along those lines, right?
So, yeah.
And so, the reality is that if Hannah's family...
I'm just going to focus on them, right?
I'm sure they're fine people in many ways, Hannah, and I'm not trying to throw them under the bus or anything like that, but what I'm pointing out is that if you want people to respect reason and evidence...
You must be rational about the evidence you are experiencing.
You must always demonstrate the values you wish other people to adopt.
And if you are not living the values that you want other people to adopt, you will never succeed in changing their minds.
Human beings are empirical thinkers.
In other words, especially when someone comes along with a radical notion Or a series of notions.
The first thing that human beings look to is, is this person living the values that he's espousing?
Unless that person is Marx, in which case you can bang the maid, throw her out on the street with your bastard child who you refuse to acknowledge and then complain that capitalists exploit their workers.
So, are you living the values That you wish others to absorb.
I had this guy on the show the other day who said education should be free and he charged money for his books.
I haven't released this yet.
I've done a critique of a guy who said education should be free and his 180-page Kindle book is 40 freaking dollars.
Yeah, okay.
Now, I don't really care what he says after that, right?
Education should be free.
Now, my taxpayer...
He's an academic, right?
My taxpayer-funded book I will sell to you electronically for $40 a pop.
And it's like, do you not even...
Like, I don't even know where to start with people like that, right?
Now, if you want people to accept empirical evidence...
You cannot continue to convince them after years of failure without looking kind of crazy.
Yeah.
Okay.
I do try to...
You take a deep breath and accept and say, okay, so the reality is that they don't accept reason and evidence.
That's the reality.
And most people don't.
In fact, we've got a presentation coming up on this, so I'll just keep this very brief because we'll go into more.
There is a significant number of studies, Richard, that show, quite conclusively, that when you bring reason and evidence to somebody's belief system and that reason and evidence contradicts that person's belief system, do you know what happens to their belief system?
Yeah, it makes it stronger.
It makes it stronger.
I understand these things.
You have disproven the idea of God.
I'm off to church.
So you're like this statism-strengthening, anti-empirical libertarian robot.
It's like, why, it's very strange.
Every salvo we fire at them makes their energy shield stronger.
Let's keep firing!
That's not going to work, right?
Yeah, and I understand.
The only one you can change is yourself, and I've gone about trying to do that.
Sorry, you're just giving me the Dr.
Phil fortune cookie or something.
Also, would it be fair to say that Dutch people are quite into feeling contented and stable and secure?
That's the premium that they place on that kind of happiness?
Well, of course, yeah.
And if it's not, then the government helps them to do that.
No, no, I get that.
I mean, that's why they believe that the government programs are going to add to stability and security and all this kind of stuff, right?
So contentment is a considerable coin in Dutch society, right?
And people who look discontented, it's an argument against whatever that person is saying, right?
It would be, yeah.
So they're going to judge you and say, well, that guy looks really tense and cranky and misanthropic and discontented, which goes against everything that we hold as the good in our society, right?
Yeah.
It's like someone screaming an argument at Socrates, right?
The argument might be good, but the fact that he's screaming and Socrates values self-control is going to kind of cloud out whatever the person is actually saying, right?
Yes.
So you're saying I should change tact, basically?
Well, no.
But you see, now you're just saying, well, how else can I get them to accept reason and evidence, right?
Okay, them accepting reason and evidence doesn't work.
There's no other tactic than reason and evidence.
Maybe I could pay them.
I could bribe them.
I could take hostages.
What can I do?
I can whisper to them in their dreams.
I can replace their television stations with free domain radio 24-7.
Actually, that's a good idea.
Anyway, we'll come back to that.
There's no backup strategy than reason and evidence, right?
There's no plan B for philosophy, right?
Reason and evidence, reason and evidence.
If that's not working, what else can I do?
Nothing!
Well, maybe I should just join a deity or something.
Join a what?
Deity.
Religion.
Yeah.
But anyway...
This is not to say that you're not an integral part of making the world a better place, right?
Yeah.
It's just that I would submit that the way you're going about it obviously isn't working and the fact that you're resisting the fact that it's not working is important because that's not following the values that you espouse.
And do you think it makes you a better or slightly less better parent to be frustrated and oppositional with the world a lot of times?
Obviously, it's not very healthy, I think.
Hannah?
Mm-hmm?
Is she still here, Hannah?
Yes, I am here.
Okay, good.
Hannah, question, if you don't mind.
Do you think that it makes Richard a better or slightly not-so-better husband if he's discontented and oppositional a lot of the time?
Slightly less good.
Is it slightly or slightly more than slightly?
It's slightly more than slightly.
Slightly.
Is it almost a lot?
At times when it gets a bit overboard, yeah, it gets a lot.
Right.
So, Richard, if we look empirically at your scorecard, number of Dutch people converted to anarcho-capitalism?
No.
I'm sorry?
What was that?
That's zero.
Zero, okay, zero.
To be fair though, you've had what?
Six years?
Yeah, it's not long.
So six years, hundreds if not thousands of conversations, conversion rate, zero.
Well, there's a lot of entrenchment here.
Dutch people are winning, right?
Dutch people are victorious.
They're doing like some massive barbarian victory tap dance on what remains of your soul, right?
So Dutch people, massive victory.
So zero Dutch people converted to whatever belief system, right?
However, number of children and wives annoyed by this process.
Out of two.
Out of two, what are we batting?
Out of two, would you say that it's two?
Yes.
Right.
Okay.
So, six years of labor, I think I'm starting to see why your business might not have worked.
And until we can solve this, I would not want you to try to become an entrepreneur.
Do you understand?
Maybe I'm just too damn persistent.
Persistent is one way of putting it.
I'm not sure it's the way I'd put it, but it's one way of putting it, right?
But, so number of Dutch people, when you've invested thousands of hours of fractious conversation, number of Dutch people converted to reason and evidence, zero.
Number of family members annoyed by this process, 100% of two, right?
Soon to be three, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so I'm not...
Now, if you were a businessman...
And you were to say, well, my goal is to try and get people to love philosophy.
Well, you've annoyed or alienated just about everyone you've talked to, at least in the Netherlands.
So they've not been converted to a love of wisdom and philosophy.
On the other hand, it's really annoyed your wife and child as well.
So they look at philosophy in a less favorable light, right?
I'm not sure if it's philosophy, but anyway, yeah, I understand where you're coming from.
It's a no-win game.
Right, so you have a business plan called Make People Like Wisdom and Philosophy.
You've been working at it for six years, and not only have you not sold the love of wisdom and philosophy, you've alienated people from the love of wisdom and philosophy.
I guess potentially, yeah.
Well, you said zero have been converted and we asked whether your wife and child have been annoyed by it and we found out yes, right?
Yeah, okay.
So the evidence points that I have indeed done that.
When your business failed in New Zealand, Richard, did you ignore warning signs?
Did you ignore negative indicators ahead of time?
Yeah.
Do you see that this is a similar pattern?
You're not able to third eye yourself in this area.
Third eye means abstract yourself out of yourself and judge the efficacy and effect of your actions relative to your stated goals.
A business plan has stated goals.
By the end of this quarter, we hope to have sold 2,000 units.
Yeah, no, I understand how it works.
But I get that when you were in business, you didn't have plans that you adjusted your behavior based upon the achievement or non-achievement of those plans.
You just kept doing what you do until the business collapsed under you, right?
Well...
I'm sorry?
Not really.
Not really, no, but I understand what you're coming from.
The analogy is not necessary, yeah.
So, until...
And this is hard to do.
Because you really, really want people to listen to reason and evidence.
It's not just an emotional investment like it's a manifestation of your discontent.
Your discontent comes from frustration because when we work with philosophy, we want people to listen to philosophy.
And it's not just because we want to be right.
It's because we want civilization to survive.
If we look at what's going down in Greece, that's just a tiny taste, right?
So for Hannah, it's not just, oh, he's discontented and it's manifest— It is serious business, and it's important to him, and I get where you're coming from, Richard.
I mean, we're brothers of, you know, dedication to this particular cause, but we must measure our successes and adjust our behavior.
If you were happier...
I'm not saying you're not happy.
If you were happier...
If you were more enthusiastic, if you were more contented, if you were more satisfied with your life, do you think it would be easier or harder for people to listen to what you had to say?
I guess it would be easier, but I think it would be easier.
It would be.
You don't buy the diet book from the fat guy, right?
He may have the best diet, but who's got time to figure it out, right?
Yeah.
I mean, if the fat guy says this is the best diet for thinness, either A, he's followed his diet and it's made him fat, or B, he thinks thinness is really important but can't even be bothered to follow his own diet, in which case, why on earth would he write a book about it and try and sell it, right?
So if you've got something which says, listen, philosophy can help you be really happy...
And the reason I'm saying that is that it's really tough to sell discontent to people in the Netherlands who, as we already established, are kind of focused and interested on contentment, right?
Yeah.
You too can be unhappy and frustrated like me.
And, as an added bonus, I can guarantee you that nothing is going to change in your lifetime.
Come join me in my discontentment parade off a cliff.
Having trouble finding followers?
Yeah, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
You're selling K to R's.
Anyway, sorry.
That's all my gene war stuff.
Anyway.
You're trying to sell wolf pelts to...
Well, actually, wolf pelts you probably could sell to bunnies.
You're trying to sell wolves to bunnies.
Right?
So, this is the...
And you're in...
And I'm not saying you shouldn't be.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be, but you're in...
You're married, you've got a kid, the kid's got a relationship with grandparents, extended family, friends, you're in the whole thing, right?
And nobody made you go in, you chose, right?
I mean, if you spent six years planning to move to Botswana, you move to Botswana, you don't say, oh my god, I'm trapped in Botswana, right?
No, of course not.
And that's what I did here, too.
I also didn't.
So let go trying to change people's minds.
You've got to let go of that.
Look, I'm a guy who's out there in the world trying to change people's minds, right?
So I get that I'm saying to you, let go of trying to change people's minds.
I get that that's probably annoying to hear and I recognize and it's different though.
First of all, I'm not talking to particular individuals in my immediate circle.
Who I'm desperate to change and who for six years have resisted listening to reason and evidence.
I'm talking to the world as a whole, trying to find like-minded individuals who are ready for change and help just accelerate where they're going, right?
So the difference is that you're someone who's...
I'm sorry to again insult your family, Hannah.
I don't mean this in any literal way.
But you're like someone who's a gymnastics coach, who's in a town full of lazy fatties, And you're trying to convince them to get into gymnastics, right?
I'm like a gymnastics coach who says, gymnastics coach available, and waits for people to call and pony up, right?
Sure.
This stuff comes into the family though, like this homeschooling, for instance.
I've bought books, I've listened to hours and hours of research, finding out about this stuff, and I've got really enthusiastic about it.
I've also looked at the schooling system and talked to teachers here who are appalled by it themselves.
So I'm trying to put this reason and evidence towards Hannah, and she's saying, no, but look, everybody else is doing that.
Why should we change?
Okay, I get that.
I get that.
But you chose her as the mother of your children.
Sure, but I don't chose the society to make my child into a cookie cutter.
Yes, you did.
If I do, I don't want to be.
No, were you deposited there in a rain barrel?
No, I... You chose this society.
Of course.
You could be living in the bluegrass back mountain ass of Kentucky.
In a shack, right?
And then nobody would care.
In fact, if you sent your kids to a government school, you'd be ostracized for that, right?
Yes, but my child doesn't choose it.
My child is put here.
And she doesn't choose that system, and I have the ability to change that.
Well, you do, but you won't be able to successfully change it if it comes at the expense of your relationship with your wife.
Right?
So if you do things to damage the relationship with your wife, I can guarantee you that your child will be far happier and far more successful and far better adjusted In a government school with happy parents than in an untraditional, nontraditional school environment with unhappy or separated parents.
Yes, I know.
Because anything that you do to harm your relationship with your wife is far worse than anything the government can do to your children outside of putting them in jail, which I don't imagine is imminent in your environment.
Maybe not.
So it's a bit of a...
No, no.
That's not a maybe.
Don't you pull a Dutchman on me, man.
I've got reason and evidence behind me.
Government schools are not as bad for children as single parenthood or fighting parents.
I've got bombinthebrain.com.
You've got tons of evidence for that, right?
No, I accept the evidence.
Okay, good.
Because you wouldn't want to be somebody who complains about other people who reject reason and evidence.
So the important thing is not whether you're children...
Are homeschooled or government schooled, the important thing is, how well are you getting along with your wife?
Now, that having been said, Hannah, and I'm sure now that this is recorded, you can play this back to your children.
But Hannah, you said you'd be willing to look into it in this conversation.
Maybe that was a switch or whatever, but if there's enough evidence and all that, and of course if it's important to your husband and you feel it could have a positive impact, you could give it a shot, right?
I mean in terms of looking into it, right?
Yeah, for me it's important to meet other people who do that and to feel, you know, feel part of a community that does that and I feel connected to that community.
That's for me the important thing, whatever books say.
Right, right.
Okay, then that's what you need to do, right?
I mean, you need to call these people up and you need to go to their open houses and you need to go, maybe take a day and go with them on a trip to a museum or to a science center or wherever they're going to go.
And see, well, if they're a bunch of lunatics, you know, with feral children with sharpened teeth, well then, you know, it may not be the place for you, right?
But, you know, if not, something worth exploring, right?
So your wife obviously needs not just the statistics, but she needs the experience of interacting with these people.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, yeah.
That's what I always need, yeah.
Right.
Because, you know, she's a woman.
And, you know, not to box everyone into a particular category, there's a bell curve, right?
But when it comes to, like, men like data and women need relationships, right?
Yeah.
And so respect that, you know, obviously, Hannah, you respect that he's got some facts behind what he's talking about, but that's not the final way.
That's not the only means by which you're going to make a decision.
No.
And recognize, Richard, that Hannah needs to know that her child is going to be around people who aren't crazy.
Sure.
Can I ask you this question?
The influence of your family and the influence of your friends is extremely strong.
If we turn around and say we're going to homeschool children, are you going to be able to stand up against them?
Well, if I feel that I'm part of a community that I feel connected with and that is working for us, then that would be very different than if we would be sort of, well, if I would have the feeling that we would be some sort of outcast and that I would feel our child is better off in the school.
But that's where I feel that...
Because I've heard it mentioned on this show that when you turn around and say, oh, I'm homeschooling my child, that parents are often like, oh, so I'm doing something wrong?
It's the same as sending them to daycare.
That might happen.
But if you have a good enough case and a good enough set of reasons...
That you are convinced, right?
Forget about convincing other people, right?
It's you guys, if you know, deep in your hearts, based upon reason and evidence, right, the reason being the data and the evidence being the experience of meeting these people, that this is the best place for your kids, well, that's all that matters, because most people won't judge.
They have no...
Here's the great secret of life, guys.
Very few people have any capacity to judge anything objectively.
So what they do is they judge how you judge it.
If you guys are certain, confident, and united that this is the best thing for your child, very few people will question it.
And now, I'm not saying that you have to totally believe me on that.
That's been my experience throughout life.
Yeah, I recognize that.
Certainty breeds trust.
Otherwise, politicians would never ever gain power.
The madly confident just draw people behind them in their wake.
Society and its energies and its focus belongs to people who have the most certainty in themselves about what they're doing.
Now, philosophy helps you know that what you're certain about isn't insane.
Hitler was pretty certain that the Jews were very bad people.
So, certainty is not enough.
I mean, psychotics are certain that they're talking to Jesus or whatever, or that they're Napoleon or whatever, right?
So, but philosophy has you be rationally certain, like science as opposed to religion or whatever, rationally certain.
Double-blind experiments in medicine, all that kind of stuff.
We want to be rationally certain.
If you guys are certain, you'll be absolutely shocked at how few people criticize you.
Or if they do criticize you, it doesn't matter.
You know, people criticize me, they can blab on all they want.
But just call me up and tell me how I'm wrong.
If you're not willing to do that, what do I care what you say?
You're just making noise, right?
Yeah, sure.
But I guess that's the backup that I need to feel as well.
You mean that kind of certainty?
Well, from the other half of the relationship.
Well, but you haven't, I don't think, you haven't explored what Hannah needs Do you feel certain?
Well, I have.
I did know that we have discussed it and that was the conclusion we came to.
Yes, she might consider it if we go and find some people.
But have you done it?
Well, no, I haven't.
Okay.
Does your daughter still nap?
She does.
Do you have time to look up Yes, of course I do.
But bear in mind...
So Richard, you know what your wife needs to feel more secure about this possibility, you've had the time to do it, you haven't done it, and you're complaining that she's not behind this program or this goal?
Well, I'm just not sure if it's going to be a waste of time anyway.
No, no, no.
Don't wheeze loud on me, man.
Come on.
I'm trying to help you here.
I'm trying to help you, man.
Don't pull the Dutchman.
Come on, man.
Come on.
Right?
She's told you what she needs to feel more secure about this decision.
You know exactly what to do, and you've certainly had the time to do it, and you haven't done it.
Then you don't get to complain that she's not behind you.
You don't.
And they're trying to empower you here, right?
Because the passivity and the complaining is only making things worse, right?
Hannah, am I on the right page here?
I don't mean to speak for you.
Yeah.
Because then he gets angry that I don't look up a group, whereas, I mean, for me, it's not, at the moment, the main priority to look up a group.
Well, it's his idea, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So it's your job to look up the group, if it's your idea, right?
I want to take you out for dinner.
Why haven't you chosen us a restaurant?
It's like, wait a minute.
Yeah, sure.
And it's because probably you've been focusing on this discontent for so long that it's just become like a habit, right?
In other words, that you are probably in a situation now, Richard, whether it comes from your childhood or just from the last half decade plus, you're probably kind of in a situation now where...
You've become so used to this, it's like a wind you've been walking against for so long that if the wind stops, you're just going to fall down.
Right?
So you may be engineering situations for this discontent at the moment simply because it's what you've become used to.
Because this is a very clear, it's going to be frustrating and it's going to create a discontent situation, right?
I mean, if you look at it objectively, she's told you what she needs, you've had the time to do it, you haven't done it, therefore it's your fault, right?
You want to do this?
She doesn't want to in particular, but she's open-minded enough to say, well, if you get me this, set up a meeting, set up a group, whatever, right?
And if you haven't done that, then that's on you, right?
In terms of why she hasn't gotten bored yet, right?
Yeah, but maybe that's a bit from previous experiences with other things.
It could be, and this is why it's so important to manage your discontents.
It's so important to not put yourselves in situations where your strengths make you impotent.
Right?
When you have really unusual ideas, first of all, society has evolved to the point Where people just slander you, they don't kill you.
I'm not trying to characterize your family as a bunch of backwoods murderers or anything, Hannah, but society has evolved.
People will just say you're an idiot or you're a bad guy or whatever it is, right?
But they don't actually sort of come after you with pitchforks or anything.
That's, you know, yay, planet, right?
I mean, good job, everyone.
And so it's really, really important to not spend your fuel fighting what you don't need to fight or what you can't win against, right?
You know, like if you're doing some slingshot, I don't know if you know, you're doing some slingshot around a planet, then you've got to fire with gravity, right?
Yeah.
You go whipping around the planet and you fire your jets just at the right time and all that, right?
Yeah.
And if you have a rocket that wants to take off, you better damn well have enough fuel and thrust to break orbit.
Otherwise, you're just going to pull some spiralized Soviet rocket maneuver into the ground, right?
Yeah.
So, save your energies for areas that you can have genuine and positive effect.
Do not spend your energies On that which cannot succeed.
Or even if it does succeed, who cares, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I remember when I was in graduate school and I was working late one night.
This is going to sound bad, but I'm just going to say it anyway.
I was working late one night.
I had this little...
It wasn't even an office.
It was a cubicle in the library.
And I was working on my thesis.
And this janitor came by.
And he was bored and lonely.
And I don't mind chatting, right?
So he was sort of asking me what was going on.
And this, that, and the other, right?
And I told him what I was working on.
This big thesis I had.
And, you know, he got...
As they say in England, chuffed at it.
I don't know if they still say that.
Maybe it was just my Mallory Towers books.
But anyway, he got chuffed at it, and he got upset at it, and he opposed it, and so on, right?
And I was sort of getting into it with him, and then I thought, eh, he's a janitor.
I mean, I'm not talking to the leader of the free world here.
I'm not talking to the next intellectual leader of the future, right?
And that sounds bad, and I'm not saying you shouldn't have debates with people who are janitors and all that, But in terms of like, he was getting, and it wasn't even that we were having a debate, it's that he was getting upset and it was getting emotionally draining to manage his upset.
Maybe he was religious or whatever, right?
And it was like, is this worth it?
Is this a good use of my time and energies?
In other words, I could spend the next hour fighting with this guy or I could pack up, go to a coffee shop and keep working on my thesis.
Get my degree, get on with my life.
Because, I mean, even if I budged this guy, somehow, somewhere, right?
Maybe it would have an effect.
Who knows, right?
I wouldn't consider it hugely likely.
I'd already read a bunch of IQ stuff by this point.
Again, it's not for certain, right?
I mean, there's all these Rayman phenomenon or Good Will Hunting phenomenon.
Not particularly rare, which is why they make movies about them.
Janitor.
Still likes sports, right?
But would you say that it would have been a good use of my time and energies to try and budge this guy's perspective when he had no experience in philosophy, no experience in critical thinking, to my knowledge, highly emotionally invested in the opposite position, or was it better for me to say, well, thanks for the chat, to pack up, to go to a coffee shop, And to keep working on my thesis, which got me my degree, which, you know, maybe adds a tiny ounce of credibility to what I do here.
Yeah, of course, the letter.
Yeah, so like the saying in New Zealand, arguing with an idiot just makes two of you.
Yeah, I don't even know if he was an idiot.
It was just, was it, you know, was it a worthwhile or practical?
Like, I try to sort of abstract myself and say, okay, I've got limited resources, infinite desires, limited resources.
What should I work on?
And it's some combination of what I think people will like to see and what interests me, right?
I don't want to be a slave to other people, but neither will I expect other people to be a slave to my every particular whim and preference.
So now, of course, you have...
If my daughter had been waiting for me, To come and read her a goodnight story, a bedtime story, would it have been better for me to stay and argue with this janitor when he was getting really upset, for no discernible reason, or to pack up and say, I'm sorry man, I gotta tuck my daughter in, right?
Well, my daughter, right?
You fighting with your family, with your wife's family, bad for your marriage?
Bad for your kids?
What's it achieving?
Yeah.
Negative.
Not much at all.
Nothing.
So this is not practical.
You're not looking at things empirically.
You're not looking at things rationally.
It's, you know, and I hate to say this about anybody who's into philosophy, Richard, but it is self-indulgent.
It's about you.
It's not about the people you're arguing with.
It's not about your kids.
It's not about your marriage.
It's not about your happiness.
It's not about saving the world.
You're pugnacious and you're frustrated.
But it's nothing to do with philosophy.
Sorry, fireworks.
Just in case anybody thinks I'm talking about society, not killing philosophers and people taking shots at me.
But it is self-indulgent.
I get that you're passionately committed to the cause, but I get where Hannah's coming from when she says this is an expression of personal frustration rather than a commitment to a particular belief system.
Yeah.
This is possibly just an expression of my frustration.
Yeah, yeah.
And you're turning people off philosophy, right?
It's making you not as great a dad as you could be.
I'm not saying you're bad, right?
Obviously, Hannah is very positive about your parenting, which is great.
I believe her.
But it's making you not as great a dad as you could be, it's not making you as great a husband as you could be, and it's not changing the fundamental structure of society in the Netherlands, right?
Not yet, not quite!
You know, six years of zero, maybe 6.1 will be 10,000, but I doubt it, right?
Maybe a product that hasn't sold for six years and has alienated people from even wanting to talk about the product, Well, I think we know what's going to happen in year seven, right?
Not putting my money on it.
Right.
So I know it's a big topic and all that, and I can always sense the outraged and annoyed emails coming my way, but that's fine.
That's the gig, right?
But has this been helpful in terms of at least a way of looking at it that might be helpful?
Yeah, it has.
I'm still not certain that I'm...
It sort of leaves me with this dilemma that I still feel that I have some purpose that I should be doing that I'm not fulfilling.
Well, okay, I don't know exactly where you should go, but I know you shouldn't be going this way.
Yeah.
So why don't you try not mutilating yourself with pugnaciousness for a while and see how you feel?
If you've got a blinding migraine and you say, and I'm not sure what I want to do with my life, I'll say, well, why don't we try not having a blinding migraine for a month or two or three or six or twelve, and then I bet you it'll be pretty clear what will be more fun for you in life.
But you can't plan for your life when you've got a raging toothache, other than my plan for my life is to get to a dentist, right?
Yeah, sure.
So you've got this discontent that comes out of this pugnaciousness that comes out of whatever, right?
And the reality is that if you don't have that for a while, what might your life be like?
You might find that you're pretty content.
You might find that the discontent was simply...
Trying to change people who wouldn't listen to reason and not listening to the empirical evidence that they weren't going to listen to reason.
Maybe your life is a lot more satisfying than you think it is if you stop chasing rainbows off cliffs.
Maybe.
Don't prejudge that yet.
I'd say cool your jets, cool your pugnaciousness and your opposition to that which isn't changing anyone anyway and see what your life is like afterwards.
Maybe nothing needs to be fundamentally fixed.
You just got to start breaking things It could be It could be.
I have a feeling that it's not.
You have a feeling that it's You have a feeling that that's not the case?
I just don't feel contended that that's the real root of where the problem is.
Well, would you say that we've taken a different approach to the root of your problems during this conversation?
Looking at myself more, self-critiquing.
Because I'll tell you, from my perspective, I get that you're frustrated because it's frustrating for me, Richard, when I've given you, I think, a pretty radical set of approaches to your issues, which you've had no chance to process yet, and you had no chance to talk about with your wife yet, and if you had no chance to sit on, and you've certainly had no chance to experiment with, right?
Then you say, well, I'm pretty sure that's not it.
Well...
That's really annoying, right?
Because you say, well, this could be a really important change.
This could be, right?
And then, like, well, without trying it, without really thinking about it, without having emotionally processed it, without having figured out the root of my pugnaciousness, without maybe apologizing to people for being pugnacious and then not doing those kind of arguments that lead nowhere, and being a better father and being a better husband, without any of that, I'm pretty sure it's not going to work.
You haven't done any of that.
You're pretty sure it's not going to work.
Oh, well, I didn't say it was going to work.
You didn't think that was it, though?
No, that's just my feeling.
It's not what the evidence is showing, but that's just what I feel right at this moment.
That's what I was expressing.
Well, that's not a feeling, that's a judgment.
It's not going to work as a judgment, right?
Yeah, it is.
and that's putting words in my mouth because I didn't say it wasn't going to work.
But I would like to try this.
Okay, I'll take what I can get.
Hannah, how did I do with the conversation?
Yeah, well, I would be very happy if we would be We would try to be happy with life as it is.
And not get into these arguments and not focus on all the things that are wrong in the world.
Focus on what is nice in the world.
As you say, it's not Zimbabwe here.
Focus on what you can do and focus on your strength.
I think that would be very beneficial for all of us.
Yeah, you know, in the big picture, Socrates had to drink hemlock, and you've got some recalcitrant Dutch people.
Yeah.
Not too bad, right?
Yeah.
And I think that you're right.
Nietzsche went mad, and Spinoza was ostracized from the entire Jewish community, and other philosophers committed suicide, been burned at the stake.
And you've got some social awkwardness and some people who aren't listening very well.
Okay.
You know, not bad.
Yeah.
And I think that you're right that he sort of got stuck in this mode that he just, you know, it would be good just to let it go for a while and see how it goes.
Just try life without it.
Yeah.
Because not doing anything anyway other than making you unhappy and making other people unhappy.
Negative about philosophy, so clearly what you're doing isn't working, so try life without it and see what life is like if you're not beating your head against the wall.
I bet you'll find it quite pleasant.
And in finding life more pleasant, I bet that people will be curious about your philosophy.
This is not an either-or.
If you can find more peace and contentment and happiness in your life, Richard, I bet you people will be a lot more open to what you have to say.
We buy diet books from the thin guy, and we listen to philosophy from the happy person, or at least the person who's got wisdom.
And pugnacity and rejecting reason and evidence is not wise, right?
So I'm not saying, well, give up your desire to change people's minds.
Well, give up your desire to improve the world.
I'm saying embrace your capacity to change the world by giving up exhausting, useless, embittering combat that doesn't achieve anything that you want and achieves really the opposite of what you want.
It pushes people away, right?
Yeah.
And it hasn't worked for six years, and it's not going to work in the future.
You're working against the cause that you claim you wish to serve, right?
And that's what I mean by self-indulgent.
People are self-indulgent when they say they have a goal, and they refuse to measure and adjust their behavior relative to that goal.
You have a goal to change people's minds, you're alienating people from yourself and from philosophy, and you're not changing your approach.
That's what I mean by self-indulgent.
I don't mean you're self-indulgent or a bad person.
That particular aspect.
And I have to do this with myself all the time.
Please understand, I'm not preaching from some nirvana plane of perfection here.
Oh, did I go too far?
Is this okay?
Balance, you know, and all that.
It is a great challenge.
Yeah, yeah.
But do something different, right?
I mean...
For your kids, for your wife, for yourself.
And for philosophy, do something different.
You might be surprised how many people are open to what you have to say when you're not fighting them.
Or maybe I just ran out of testosterone.
I don't know.
Alright, can I move on to the next call?
Will you guys let us know how it goes?
Yes, we will.
At least send me a baby pic if you don't mind.
I'll keep it private.
We will.
Alright.
Thank you very much.
Remember.
Alright, take care guys.
All the best.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Bye.
Alright, well up next is Daniel.
Daniel wrote in and said, I was fired from my job of nine years, and since then I've been going from one low-paying entry-level job to another.
I have a useless degree, recently turned 30, and feel like I am stuck.
How can I improve my situation?
That's from Daniel.
Hmm.
Alright.
What happens with these low-paying jobs?
Um, it's just, um...
I was at this job for nine years.
After seven years, I got promoted to a kind of supervisor position.
I had that position for two years, then got fired.
And then since then, you know, I've been basically starting over.
And all the jobs I've had since then have been these low-paying, entry-level jobs.
And I just feel like I'm never going to move up, or if I do, it would take forever.
Yeah, I think it's what Douglas Copeland calls McJobs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why did you get fired?
Kind of a long story.
I was in that position for two years.
Things were going okay.
Then right when we got this new manager, I made a mistake.
And then since then, she pretty much thought I sucked and then just...
Looked for any excuse to write me up and just wrote me up for all these nitpicky little things.
So I kept messing up and eventually they fired me over this little petty thing that isn't really particularly interesting.
I don't know if you want me to get into the detail.
No, she got into your head, right?
And you just stopped wanting to go to work, stopped wanting to do a good job.
Yeah, it's really tough when you sort of check out of a job in terms of its enjoyment.
It's really tough to hang in there, right?
Yeah.
I remember many, many years ago, I worked part-time at a place, and they were selling something, and they said, oh, you can get it up and running in three months, and talked to the other guys.
It's like, oh, man, it's like two years, right?
And I was like, oh, man.
It pays for itself in three months, right?
The guys who installed it were saying, oh, no, it takes like two years.
And after that, I'm like, oh, I don't know.
Either management doesn't know this, in which case it's a very dysfunctional organization, or Well, management does know this, in which case...
Anyway, so yeah, it's tough.
Once you sort of lose faith or get set against something or lose your enthusiasm, it's really tough to chug along, right?
Yeah.
Right.
And I'm assuming then that the reference was a problem, right?
From her, like, there's other managers I used to work with that I got references from.
Right.
That I got along with.
Right, okay.
So your references weren't bad.
And did you apply for new jobs at a similar level to your last job?
Yeah, I didn't get any of them.
I applied at a lot of different places.
I would get maybe one interview for every 100 applications I send out.
And I don't know.
I feel like getting the position I got was kind of a fluke.
That I'm not really...
The type of person that would usually get promoted to a supervisor.
I'm not really outgoing or anything, but I was there for a long time.
So my managers knew me and they liked me and they gave me a chance.
And I feel like starting over with other people that don't know me, they wouldn't give me the same chance to move up.
And why do you think it ended up with you getting fired?
Did you think that something was going to change or did you not?
Because it's better to quit than be fired, right?
Yeah, but I was making decent money there, and because I had done the position for two years, I didn't think I was going to keep messing up, and I just kind of hoped for the best.
Right, okay.
And how intelligent would you say that you are?
I'm intelligent.
Like what?
Top 20%, top 50%?
Um...
Off the top of your head.
I mean, obviously, it's not scientific.
Uh...
I have no idea.
I guess 20, maybe?
I don't know.
I used to get among the highest grades in the classes I had.
I was up, you know, top 5 or 10 percentile, I think.
Okay.
Okay, so smart, right?
Okay.
And what would an employer stand to gain from you?
Like, if you were going for a job with me, I know this is tough, it's ill-defined, right?
But if you were going to a job with me, why would I hire you over the other hundred people who sent in resumes?
That's the thing.
I never know how to answer questions like that.
I don't know what to say in interviews.
And I'm not good with First impressions, whether it's interviews or in real life.
Right.
Yeah, I don't know.
But it's not about you when you go for a job interview, it's about what you can provide to the employer, right?
Yeah.
So what can you provide to an employer as to why that employer should...
It's not like some trick.
You just come across as smooth, right?
You can have a monotone when you speak, but if you understand your job is to make more money for the employer that they spend on your wage, then the employer at least understands that.
Then they get that you understand what it means to be employed, right?
Because people say, oh, I've got a job, so I'm getting a paycheck.
It's like, no, you have a paycheck because you're providing value.
Your employer is not your boss, he's your customer.
Now, he has his customers, and they're the people that he needs to satisfy so that he can sell his widgets and make money to pay you.
And your boss, assuming you're not directly interfacing with customers, but even if you are, eventually it comes down to your boss is your customer.
And just as your boss has to provide value to his customers, you have to provide value to your customer who is your boss, right?
Yeah.
And so when it comes to why should someone hire you, I would assume it's because you can consistently make them the most money compared to the other 100 resumes.
Now, if you don't believe that, then you need to find a way to believe that or stop trying to get those jobs, right?
Yeah.
So, if you want to go for a job as a manager, then what do you need to learn so that you believe that you make...
Like, if you can confidently say to the manager, hell, I'll make you the most money out of all these hundred other guys who want this job.
Can you say that at the moment or is there something else you need to learn?
Yeah, I think I would need to learn.
Now, you don't have to say I'm going to make you Bill Gates style of money in the same way that Honda doesn't say we have the same quality as a Ferrari, right?
It's the best...
I'm the best person at the price you're paying, right?
Like if you can make someone a million dollars, A year, then you can ask for $350,000 in salary.
If you can make someone $10 million, you get it, right?
But if you can only make someone $100,000, then you can maybe ask for $35,000 or $40,000, right?
And it's not like they make $60,000, right?
They've got to provide the office and the computers and the insurance and all the crap, right?
And they've got to pay for the marketing and the sale.
Anyway, so...
So how much money do you think that your skill set can bring to an employer?
What's the most money that an employer can make by hiring you?
I have no idea.
Honestly, I don't really know what I'm good at and I would be content either doing a job I liked Even if it's not the best paying job.
But I thought by the time I reached 30, I'd either be doing something I liked or at least making good money, but I'm doing neither.
No, but you're not...
Are you understanding what I'm saying?
I feel like we're having two different conversations here.
Right?
Because you're making it about what you like and what you want, right?
An employer...
And, you know, I'm sorry to be so blunt.
I'm sure you know this stuff, but just in general, right?
An employer doesn't care what you want.
An employer is not there to make your life fulfilling or to give you a fun work environment or to give you the kind of money that you feel you deserve.
An employer is there for a good employer.
A smart employer is there for one reason and one reason only, which is to make money.
And it's not just about the money.
The money is a reflection of accurately and efficiently satisfying other people's desires.
So your boss will give you a fun work environment if it will make more money and get the right people.
You'll get nerf balls at Google if it ups productivity and gets you smart, out-of-the-box thinkers or whatever, right?
We had LAN games of Unreal Tournament when I was in charge of the R&D team, but it was a lot of fun and it bonded the team and sometimes we'd do it while we were working late so people wouldn't mind working late so much.
And that was my responsibility to our customers and to our employees, which is to keep the money coming in.
You can't keep the money coming in.
It doesn't matter what you want or what other people want.
There's no business then, right?
Yeah.
So, forget about what you want.
My question is, okay, what was your salary in the job you got fired from?
$11.44 an hour.
$11.44 an hour.
So that's like $23,000 a year, right?
I don't think it was that much.
Maybe like $18 or $19.
Right.
So my question is, if you are in the top 5 or 10% of intelligence, what are you doing being in the top 10 or 15% of wages?
I don't know.
Are you going to participate in this conversation at all?
Because you're just going to give me these blank answers.
I can move on to someone else.
Yeah, it's like, I don't really know what I can do.
I don't know what I can...
Okay, no, I get that.
I understand that.
You've said that a bunch of times.
But my question is, if you don't know what you can do, what are you doing to find out?
Like, you know, I wanted a temp job because I was tired of waitering.
So I wanted to work in an office because I knew as sure as hell that you can't waiter forever if you've got any brains, right?
So I... I was like, I want to work in an office.
Okay, so what do I need to work in an office?
Well, I need computer skills, right?
I couldn't afford, because I was a waiter, I couldn't afford to pay for computer classes, so I got a copy of WordPerfect 5.1, and I learned all about WordPerfect and how to do mail mergers, and you just learn that shit, or whatever it is, right?
So I'm like, okay, I want to work in an office.
There's not a lot of people who appreciate you bringing a fast fettuccine Alfredo in an office, so...
I realized if I want to work in an office, then I need to learn office-y stuff, right?
And the easiest and quickest thing to learn was word processing, and then through that I learned spreadsheets, and through that I learned databases, and through that I learned programming, and through that I learned business.
So you take these steps, right?
Yeah.
And so my question is, okay, so you say, well, I don't know What I have to offer an employer.
So my question is, do you just sit shrug and say, okay, well then I don't know what to offer an employer.
Or do you say, so what do I need to learn to get the kind of job I want?
Right?
If you want to be in management or you want to be a supervisor, are there courses in being a supervisor that I can take?
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you're working the Eastman job, so you've got a lot of downtime, right?
I mean, you're not working 80 hours a week, I assume, right?
No.
So what do you do with the remaining time?
Be honest now.
What do you do?
I was looking into any other position I could get into.
I considered going back to school, but I can't afford it.
I was talking to a friend of mine in IT, and he was suggesting learning that.
So I'm just...
Looking around on how to learn that, but I'm not good with computers, so I'm still kind of lost.
Right.
Well, I mean, from an economic standpoint, I'm not sure why you'd be suitable for anything other than these entry-level jobs.
Yeah.
Right, because if you say, well, I'm not good with computers, well, you know, surgeons aren't very good at cutting people open until they become good at cutting people open, right?
Yeah.
Right?
So if you just say, well, I'm not good at stuff, and therefore I'm just not going to learn it, well, that's kind of circular thinking, right?
Well, guess what?
You'll never be good at it, right?
I mean, nobody's good at computers when they first start, right?
Yeah, I guess I don't really know where to look to get started.
What do you mean?
I mean, I'll show you.
So if you want to learn how to program, is that right?
Like he was saying, IT, you should learn how to program.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Okay, well, have you tried learn how to program?
Have you typed that into Google?
Yeah.
And what did you find?
I was on the Robert Half website and I just don't understand.
You don't understand what?
Like this computer stuff.
So what don't you understand?
I don't know.
I ran into it.
I'm sorry.
I just honestly don't know what I can do that I would like or be good at.
Are you calling in for magic?
Right?
Because you're calling in and saying, what can I do, right?
So I'm making a bunch of suggestions and I'm getting a bunch of non-answers, right?
So I'm not sure what you expect from me.
Seriously, I'm not trying to be mean or anything.
I genuinely don't know what...
Like I'm saying, learn how to provide value, identify the skill sets in the industries you want to be a part of, and then go and learn stuff.
And you're like, well, I don't really know what value I can offer, and maybe IT, but I don't understand any introduction to coding or computers.
So then you're going to have these low-rent jobs.
There's no magic, right?
Yeah.
If you're not willing to buckle down, let me ask you a couple other questions.
Do you play a lot of video games?
No.
Do you use any mind-altering substances?
No.
So what do you do when you're not working?
Do you read a lot of books?
What do you do when you're not working?
I watch a lot of movies.
I write.
And how many movies do you watch a week?
I don't know, anywhere one to three.
Another thing I was considering was writing movie reviews.
I don't know who I would write for.
What do you mean you don't know who you would write for?
You just started a blog, right?
I guess I could.
What do you mean you guess you could?
Have you not heard of blogs?
Yeah, it's just I don't know how I would make money off of it.
I don't know how it came out.
Well, but I mean, what is that?
I mean, you've got time and it doesn't hurt you to improve your writing skills, right?
And it doesn't hurt you to write a blog if you're passionate about that stuff.
I mean, I started writing a blog in 2005.
I started writing a blog in 2005.
I didn't have any clue about how I could make money from it.
I started doing a podcast in 2006.
I had no idea how I could end up Making money from it.
I mean, I learned how to program when I was 11 or 12.
I had no idea how I was going to make any money out of it.
So, I don't...
Again, I don't quite understand your thinking, other than, I don't know if you're waiting for the clouds to open up and shower you with opportunities that you don't deserve, but I don't know what to say.
Like, you've got to do something.
You've got to do something to add to your value.
You've got to do something to identify where the gaps are in your knowledge and what you can provide employers with.
And if you say, well, I want to write movie reviews, but I don't know how I'm going to get paid, then you don't really care that much about writing movie reviews.
The reason you get paid for something like writing movie reviews is that it provides value to people, right?
Yeah.
I mean, why do people donate money to this show?
I mean, you've listened, I assume, for more than a couple of days.
So why do you think people donate money to this show?
I like listening to it.
They want to keep hearing more.
Okay, but why?
Why does it...
They could listen to it without...
They could rely on other people, and of course a lot of people do, but why do you think people donate money, and how do you think they decide how much to donate?
How much they enjoy it.
How much they want it to continue.
Right.
I would say that it provides very measurable improvements in the quality of their lives.
Somebody said, I used to hit my children.
Now I reason with them.
I used to be in abusive relationships.
I tried to fix them.
I couldn't.
Now I'm in therapy and I'm getting out of those abusive relationships.
I thought I was going to get divorced from my wife.
Now I'm not, right?
The couple we just talked to earlier, I think that this is the kind of stuff that over time can really begin to weaken a marriage.
Now if...
They may have gotten divorced without this conversation.
I'm not saying it is or does, but if that's the case, if this conversation has put them on a right track and has solved some foundational issues or at least given them an approach to solving foundational issues in their marriage, well, what is it worth for them to not be divorced?
Tens of thousands of dollars, at least, at the very bare minimum.
I guess it's not quite so bad in Europe, but, you know, what is it worth?
It's worth a lot.
Now, does that mean that they'll donate $10,000?
Well, I doubt it.
Should they?
Absolutely.
No, I'm kidding.
Well, they've got everything else paid for by the government.
But there's a measurable improvement in the quality of their relationship, the quality of their marriage, the quality of his fathering.
And so people donate because there's a measurable improvement in the quality of their lives.
I've helped people to get better jobs.
I've helped people to do really well in interviews and they get jobs and they make money and they're like, wow, I may not have got this $50,000 a year job or $75,000 a year job without this guy's advice.
So, you know, I'm going to donate some money as a way of saying thanks.
If I freed this guy, the last guy I talked to, if I freed him up from some repetitive, frustrating, negative Pugnacious interaction with people.
It's pointless fighting with people.
What's that worth to him?
To be able to have a pleasant Christmas dinner with his relatives without feeling like he's got to get all punchy about the free market.
What's that worth?
I don't know.
It's worth something, right?
Maybe his family will listen or his in-laws will listen and donate money to this show.
I don't know, right?
But it's because it's not just like you've got this really, well, they like listening to it, they want it to continue and so on.
But what I'm conscious of is the degree to which I can provide tangible and practical value.
So there's people who we just talked about.
China and all that.
Or Puerto Rico.
Maybe people are getting out of Puerto Rico bonds.
Maybe people are concerned about real estate values dropping if the Chinese stop investing, right?
There's something that provides value to people that is tangible and measurable.
And it doesn't mean like always dollars and cents, right?
Quality of life issues and so on.
But they can trace back to something about this show.
Even if it's just like I thought I was the only one who thought this stuff until I came across you, which I get all the time.
You know, like...
Or, you know, I disagree with a lot of what you say, but you always challenge my way of thinking.
Well, what's that worth, right?
And so, that's why people donate to the show, right?
Which is something I was aware of the moment that people suggested that I monetize things way back in the day, right?
But I can't monetize something unless I can provide value.
And tangible, practical, actionable value.
And that's what you need to provide to employers.
So that's the only suggestion that I can take.
And you can shrug and say, well, I don't understand this or I don't understand that.
But the reality is that then you're just going to keep having these jobs.
There's no magic about it.
Yeah, I get you.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I appreciate that.
I hope that that helps.
Let me know how it goes, of course.
And let's move on to the next caller.
All right.
Thank you.
I appreciate the time.
Thanks, man.
You're welcome.
Yep.
Alright, up next is Brian.
Brian wrote in and said, Given that socially funded research is demonstrably the best method for advancing technology and technology is the leading factor in improving the all-over standard of living, how could removing the state not be viewed as detrimental to the progression of mankind?
That's from Brian.
Alright.
Brian.
Hello.
Challenging my capacity to maintain a lizard-like blood pressure.
So, Brian, that's a great comment.
I appreciate you calling in.
I'm glad to be here.
Alright.
So, you have posed a challenging proposition, which is that you know for certain that government-funded research initiatives Are undoubtedly the very best way to advance technology in society.
I don't know if I would go as far as to say that I would say that...
Oh, oh, hang on, hang on.
No, no, no, listen.
If we don't understand each other at the beginning, let's deal with that right away.
Let me go back.
You said, given that socially funded research is demonstrably the best method for advancing technology.
Yes.
Okay, so did I not phrase that correctly when I rephrased it to you?
I would say that I wasn't making a claim of absolute certainty.
I was saying as we are right now, that the best method we have right now, which is evidence-based, shows that socially funded research is absolutely vital to innovation.
So you said, I'm going to read this again, given that socially funded research is demonstrably the best method for advancing technology, you didn't say arguably, you didn't say possibly or potentially or whatever.
You said it is.
That's an absolute say.
It's demonstrably.
And not just in my view, demonstrably means that there's practical evidence that this is true.
And I know that that is complete bullshit.
Well, no, I mean, I can cite you many peer-reviewed papers right now.
No, no, no, I don't need to.
Praxeologically, I know that's complete bullshit.
No, as I'm saying, I'm not making a claim of absolute certainty because I don't believe in any claim of absolute certainty.
I mean, I couldn't claim right now for absolute certainty that I'm here, but the vast majority of evidence would suggest that, yes, I am here right now.
We're having this conversation.
Okay, let's not get, let's not, I'm not doing another one of these, does the caller exist, and I know you're not saying that.
But the reason that I know, and I'm not saying that you're speaking bullshit.
What I'm saying is that any study which claims to prove that social or government-funded research is the best way to advance technology is absolutely wrong.
And it's complete bullshit.
The reason being that you're comparing a tangible against a potential.
So what I mean by that is, let's say somebody says, well look, we invested $100 million and we got the internet.
Let's just say, right?
Now, if they're going to say that that is by far the best possible way that that money could be spent, then what they're doing is they're saying, I know how that money would have been spent if the government had not taken it away from people by force, and I know for sure what this other scenario would have looked like if the government hadn't taken it.
That money and I can compare something which never happened to something that did happen and know that what did happen is infinitely superior to what never happened.
And that's a physical and logical impossibility.
You cannot compare something that did happen to something that didn't happen and say, I know for certain that what did happen is always better than what didn't happen.
Does that make sense?
I 100% agree with what you just said there.
Okay, so we need to correct your statement.
You said, given that socially funded research is demonstrably the best method for advancing technology, and there's absolutely no way that that can be true.
It's like saying government spending is the best way of creating jobs, because this government spending created 5,000 jobs.
But there's no way to know exactly how many jobs would have been created if the government hadn't taxed the money to create those 5,000 jobs.
We don't know what quality they would have been.
We don't know what advances may have occurred if the government hadn't taxed things.
We don't know how sustainable those jobs would have been.
We don't know what breakthroughs might have occurred in those industries that would have otherwise received that funding.
You cannot compare an existing situation with a theoretical and say, well, without a doubt, this existing situation It's always going to be better than this theoretical situation.
Anybody who would claim that is insane.
I'm not saying you are, right?
I mean, these studies, right?
I totally agree with everything you've said there.
Okay, so then your initial statement is incorrect.
No, because I'm not comparing it to a theoretical because right now the majority of innovation is privately funded.
So I'm comparing innovation which was previously government funded to innovation now which is privately funded.
So right now in Europe, 90% of innovation is privately funded.
But we do not see the same leaps and bounds in innovation now that we did when it was previously socially funded.
Okay, so let me just make sure, and I appreciate this argument, so let me make sure I understand it.
So you're saying that in the past, Research and development was 100% private funded, and now it's only 90% private funded, but that 10% is vastly superior to the other 90%.
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear that in the past, research was socially funded to a greater...
When you say socially funded, are you talking government?
I'm talking, well, I would be talking society, but government, yes, would probably be who.
Well, hang on, what do you mean by society?
Because Kickstarter is society, right?
Investors is society.
Do you mean it's funded by, like, not someone in a startup in their own basement?
When you say socially funded, do you mean investors and Kickstarter and whatever?
Or do you mean, like, government spending?
Government spending was vastly greater as a percentage for innovation in the past than it is now.
For example, after the post-war era, there was a vastly larger percent of money that was government funded than there is now.
Now, most innovation is privately funded.
And are you saying that technology accelerated faster in the post-Second World War period than it did, say, over the last 20 or 30 years with computers and the Internet and cell phones and Bluetooth and GPS and all that kind of stuff?
I mean, consumer-level GPS. Are you saying that there was more technological innovation in the post-war period than there is now?
Well, GPS and Internet were government-funded.
Well, no, not my GPS. I had to pay for it.
No, but the research that led to GPS was a government innovation.
The research that led to the internet was a government innovation.
The research that led to computers was a socially-funded, government-funded innovation.
Right, but we don't know whether if governments hadn't funded it and had left money in the hands of consumers and entrepreneurs that we wouldn't have computers that were ten times better now.
Just because this came after this doesn't mean that this is the only way it could have happened, or the best way that it could have happened.
I totally agree with you, but there's evidence to suggest that.
So, for example...
Can you give us a source, this 90% thing?
We just want to check it out.
I'm not doubting you, I just want to make sure I get the context.
HITT HITT 2002.
I'll give you the exact paper if you'd like.
If you just give me two seconds, I'll pull it up.
Sorry, I'm just...
I'll be with you.
Literally 10 seconds.
Oh, it's okay.
HITT 2002.
I'm sure we can get that fairly easily.
HITT 2002.
HITT 2002.
Ireland hit Camp Sexton.
Strategic Entrepreneur.
Creating New Mindset.
Oxford, UK. Published Blackwell.
But basically, what we see is that...
If you take the greatest leaps in technology, let's use the 20th century, because obviously the 21st century is still in its infancy.
So if we look at the progression of technology, say in the aircraft industry from 1914 to 1918 during the First World War, there's a massive leap in technology because people weren't really bored with profit and loss.
People were worried about surviving.
And then what we see is then Basically, the plane technology didn't really increase that much back until 1935.
And then we go from 1935 to 1945, and we've got the invention of the jet engine.
And if we look at things like the technology spin-offs from the other great government funded thing, which was going to the moon, the technology spin-offs are...
And it makes perfect sense when you think about...
Innovation is inherently risk.
It's risky.
So if you're a private company, there's two things that really stifle innovation.
One is you don't want to make a massive risk with your money because you think, well, if this research doesn't pan out, my company's going to go down the drain.
Another thing is, if you do Then come on to something great, you don't share it with anyone else because you want to reap the benefits of your research.
So you have the initial risk and you've also got the non-sharing of knowledge.
And we've got this thing where knowledge in the private sector...
Wait, the non-sharing of knowledge?
I'm sorry, have you ever heard of Wikipedia?
People are willing to share their knowledge for free all the time.
I don't quite understand what you mean.
People are willing to share their knowledge for free.
I mean, I see tons of blogs with no ads, tons of instructional videos.
I don't think the Khan Academy charges, right?
There's people who put their research online.
There's people who share knowledge.
I mean, you're talking to a guy who puts out his knowledge generally without charging for it.
And so, when you say people don't want to share their knowledge, I'm just a little bit confused about, say, about 98% of the entire internet.
Sorry, I wasn't very clear there, because you're absolutely right, and I really appreciate the people that do that, and I appreciate what you do as well, but I'm talking about disruptive innovation.
So when somebody comes across something really juicy, and they know they're going to change the market, then they're not going to share that with somebody else.
They're going to make as much profit off that as they can.
Of course, yeah.
Yeah, of course.
If you come up with a particularly innovative song, then you don't give it to other people before you record it yourself.
But...
What happens is then, so say for example, you had a university funded research, which is what's happening in the United Kingdom right now, where they don't have the money to plough into this anymore because the government just doesn't spend on this.
So instead of the government doing their own private, sorry, their own funded research, not privately, they pay the universities to do it, then they share all the information, and then what will happen is the companies will come along and they'll say, okay, this works, that doesn't, they'll use the stuff that works.
But The same amount of money is not going into it that previously went into it.
Okay, so hang on a sec.
Sorry, I just feel I want to really make sure we stay focused on the core issue that you brought up to begin with.
So, you say that people don't want to spend money on research and development because there's great risk, right?
Because research and development very often fails.
Is that fair to say?
Like, WD-40 is called WD-40 because it was the 40th try for them to get that particular compound going, right?
And I think Thomas Edison had hundreds and hundreds of light bulb designs before he finally got one that worked, right?
Yep.
And so, my question is, if...
The reason that private individuals don't want to risk their own money because research is so inherently risky and prone to failure, how does the government spending money on research solve that problem?
In other words, isn't the government just funding a whole bunch of stuff that fails, which it shouldn't fund because it's wasting a huge amount of money that otherwise might go into private stuff that, with more discretion, would have a greater chance of succeeding?
Yeah, the government will fund a lot of stuff that will fail, undoubtedly.
But they will also find that gem, like the jet engine.
No, no, no, I get it.
I get it.
I get it.
But what I'm trying to point out is that it's easy to look at the scene, right?
Well, the government spent money on this, and this produced economic value.
And I don't think there's anyone who would doubt that.
That certainly happens at times.
But that's not the issue.
Even if we take the moral aspect out, which we'll get to in a second.
We're just looking at the practical aspect.
But if the government spends a billion dollars on R&D, that's a billion dollars they have taken out of people's pockets, right?
Yes.
Now, that billion dollars taken out of people's pockets means that Other stuff is not getting developed because some of what people would spend on is they'd invest it, they'd buy shares, they'd start companies, they'd explore other areas of research and growth and opportunity and so on.
So the billion dollars that the government spends on particular kinds of research is a billion dollars that is taken out of people's pockets Which they then can't spend on other research.
So, you're saying that somehow...
Are you saying that the government is better at deciding what to...
In other words, when the government is spending other people's money, that the government is really great at determining what should or shouldn't be a successful research project?
Because if people in the government are really great at picking research projects that work, then they're complete morons for being in the government.
Because if you have the capacity to, ahead of time, know which research is going to work, you should be an entrepreneur and make approximately 12 quadrillion dollars a year.
So the people in the government can't possibly, they would be much worse than entrepreneurs at figuring out which research is going to pay off and which research is not going to pay off.
Because if they were as good as people in the private sector, they'd be They'd be investors, they'd be tech investors or medtech investors or whatever.
They would be investors and they would do fantastically well.
So by definition, almost like axiologically, the people who are in the government must be way worse at spending research dollars than people in the private sector.
I would say that they were actually equally, but what it comes down to is that the money...
No, no!
You can't say that!
No, no.
Because if they were, if I'm equally good...
At picking science investments as people in the government, then I would quit and do that as my job and make a fortune.
No, because it doesn't come down.
What it comes down to is that the money needs to be spent.
Now, the people in the private sector are weary.
That's not a rebuttal to my argument.
No, no, no.
You've not let me finish.
So what I'm saying is it's not as if the government throw away a million dollars in R&D and get none back.
What happens is that they develop things and they get money back off what they develop.
Now, the private sector are inherent.
There's a risk there that they do not want to spend the money.
So what happens is that they've Might weigh up what should be spent on the government.
I'm not going to disagree with that.
But while doing so, they don't invest to the same level that the government's going to do.
Of course they don't.
Look, of course they don't.
Because if you're a private company and you can offload the costs of your R&D on the helpless taxpayer, of course you're going to.
Exactly.
And then when you do that...
But that's because the system exists.
That's not because the government's better at it.
It's just that you can screw other people through taxes and not have to pay the cost directly yourself.
So why are all the great inventions government-funded and not privately funded?
Because the government goes out and funds it, they do the inventions, they take the risk, some are disastrous, some pay off, and out of that we get jet engines and planes and computers.
No, no, I get that.
I'm only going to make this argument once more.
Brian, otherwise I'm going to just have to move on because you just keep repeating the same thing as if I hadn't said anything.
Yes, let's just say you're right.
I don't know.
I haven't researched it.
And the 90% figure isn't in the study that you quoted.
But anyway, let's say that you're right.
100% right.
I don't mind.
That's fine.
You're 100% right that it was government spending in World War II that gave us the jet engine, right?
Yes.
My point is that the government spent billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars to develop a jet engine.
What was not developed because the government stole all that money from people and spent it on stuff the government wanted to spend on, which didn't have anything to do with the good of the people or the happiness of industry or the productivity of the dollar.
It had to do with buying votes, buying allegiance, making themselves look good, winning a war, whatever it was, right?
I mean, yes, we got Tang out of going to the moon.
Yes, we did.
But of the tens of billions of dollars spent going to the moon, what was not developed Because all of that money was taken out of the economy and shoveled at the delivery of some fucking moon rocks to a museum.
Well, not really, because the byproducts that go into the moon is the whole aircraft autopilot systems are based on going to the moon.
You're not just doing this again, are you?
We just had this conversation.
Look, Brian, I've already admitted and if you do this again, I'm just going to have to move on.
I'm sorry to give you this just reality.
Because we already agree.
I said, let's say the government did do this.
Well, the government produced something else.
I get that.
What is missing?
What is missing is all the things that would have been developed if the government didn't take that money from people.
Now, that's number one.
Number two, let me ask you this.
If it turned out that slavery was more efficient than paying people to voluntarily pick crops, would you be in favour of slavery?
Well, I completely understand where you're going to go with this.
Now, you don't have to agree morally with paying in taxation.
No, I'm just asking you a question.
If slavery was proven to be more economically efficient than paying people to pick crops...
Would you be in favor of slavery?
No, of course not.
Okay.
So, to me, even if we accept that your argument is perfectly true and the government is more efficient at picking research and development projects, even though they could make a billion times more money in the private sector, somehow they just prefer to be a government bureaucrat sitting on their loathsome spotty behinds, ordering scientists around with money.
Let's say that they just don't want to make all those millions and millions of dollars from being really great at picking strategic R&D Even if we accept all of that, even if we say that this miracle is somehow true, that what the government forces people to do is way, way more efficient than what they would have chosen otherwise, it doesn't matter.
Because the fact that they're stealing the money to do it is the only thing that matters.
Now, I happen to believe that the stealing of the money makes things very inefficient, but the efficiency or inefficiency of it doesn't matter at all.
I can't argue with that.
What do you mean if I believe that?
This is not me clicking my heels three times and wanting to get back to Kansas.
Do you not think that the government takes money from people by force?
Not everybody, no.
You mean there's some people who would voluntarily choose to give money to the government?
No, who would voluntarily choose to be part of a state.
Okay.
But at the moment, does the government have the power to take money from people by force?
Do they have that legal capacity?
Yeah, and that's wrong.
Okay, good.
Then we're fine.
Then the rest of it doesn't matter.
No, but it does matter because I'm not talking about the government per se, I'm talking about socially funded research where we take out the idea of profit and loss, where we share knowledge, where knowledge isn't a commodity, where knowledge is shared together for the greater good of society.
So I'm not really...
The government is just right now who redistributes the money and get into a philosophical argument of whether the government is correct to do that.
I'm not interested in that because if I agree and I want to be part of the state and you don't, then I mean, if you don't want to be part of the state, then that's completely up to you and you should be free not to be part of the state.
Obviously, you then can't reap the benefits of the state, but if that's your choice, then that's completely up to you.
So that's not something I can argue with.
But what I'm talking about, research or innovation or funding, research is funded without the idea of making profit.
Then that becomes more effective than thinking about Only going to invest in research as long as I'm going to get money back from it.
Because you never know what's going to come around the corner with the next great innovation.
If you look at the biggest innovation right now, or not innovation, but the big things, look at iPhones, for example.
Now, iPhones are They're a great product.
I mean, nobody would argue about that.
They sell brilliantly.
But they're not innovative.
They don't do anything.
iPhones took technology that was already there.
They said, here's a phone, here's a camera.
Wait, are you saying that, wait, iPhones are not particularly innovative and they're not any particular, it's not a particularly smart business move to make an iPhone?
Oh no, I didn't say it wasn't a smart business move.
I said that it's not a disruptive technology.
It's what you call a competence-enhancing technology.
They take technology...
Wait, wait, wait.
Sorry, what do you mean by...
I'm sorry to interrupt.
What do you mean by disruptive technology?
A disruptive technology is a technology that would completely change them, would completely alter them.
The exact difference of a disruptive technology is they create a new product class to make all other product technologies within that class redundant.
So the jet engine made propellers redundant.
No, it didn't.
No, listen, listen, listen.
When I worked up north, we took propeller airplanes all the time.
Do you know why?
Because we had to land on frozen lakes and jets are too fast.
And there are propeller planes all over the world.
In fact, I'd be surprised if jet engines actually even outnumbered propeller planes, because jet engines are very important for moving big numbers of people long distances or big heavy equipment long distances.
But propeller planes are fantastic if you live out in the boonies.
They're fantastic for going out on fishing expeditions.
They're fantastic at learning how to fly.
I don't know what you mean when you say jet engines rendered propeller planes redundant.
In the transatlantic market, jet engines...
Oh, in the transatlantic market?
No, I'm just giving you an example of how one technology can make another technology redundant.
I'm sure we all know how certain technologies can come along, like the Pentium processor has made other processors redundant.
You'll get a technology that will come along and it will just completely change the market and it will make all other preceding technology...
Well, Pentium, because there's lots of other processor No, I'm just giving you an example.
I'm giving an example of a disruptive technology.
Flat-screen televisions have made cathode tubes redundant.
So that's a disruptive technology.
Except the medical equipment, but okay.
So what you're saying is that iPhones have not made landlines redundant for a lot of people, like cell phones?
No, I'm saying that iPhones...
When they came along, did not create any innovative, disruptive technologies.
What they did brilliantly was they said, right, there's an MP3 player, there's a camera, there's internet access, all existing technologies.
They bundled it into a beautiful little product and made a heck of a lot of money of it, but they didn't create anything that was a disruptive, innovative technology.
Well, hang on.
I mean, here in Canada, there was a store called Black's, Black's Camera, Which was around ever since I was a kid and I think has been around or was around for over 80 years.
And what happened, of course, was that people stopped developing pictures.
Right?
Because now what they do is they have big screen TVs and they put them on their Wi-Fi media servers and they show their pictures that way.
Which is vastly better than having them in a photo album.
Obviously, they don't lose quality and you can have them cycle through the slideshow and you can have them always available to you in a very immersive way.
And so that whole chain of stores, which numbered in the hundreds across Canada, I don't know if they were in other places as well, has gone out of business.
You know, when I first was younger, I mean, you had to have a phone and then, you know, if I was going with my daughter, I might want to bring a camera.
And maybe you'd also have an MP3 player in the car or something like that.
And so you had to have a lot of different, like a Swiss Army knife, a whole bunch of things.
You had to have all these separate things.
And now, of course, you can just have your MP3 player, your newsreader, your e-book, your video camera, your recorder if you're recording meetings or something like that.
You can have all of that in one thing.
And that's very disruptive to everyone who used to make, you know, Neil Young accepted, right?
That's very disruptive to everyone who used to make the specialized stuff, right?
It's a phenomenal product, but they didn't invent the MP3 player.
They didn't invent the camera.
They didn't invent any of those technologies.
They took pre-existing technologies and bundled it into a phenomenal product, but they didn't invent it.
That's the point I'm getting at.
So that's why an iPhone is a brilliant product.
Okay, compared to what?
What is it that invents something completely out of nothing?
Well, no, the people who invented it, right?
Digital cameras predated iPhones.
MP3 players predated iPhones.
Internet accesses predated iPhones.
No, no, I get that.
But are you saying that MP3 players invented something out of nothing?
No, I'm saying that the people who invented MP3 players, they were the ones who created the disruptive technology.
Then the big companies came along, like Apple, used that technology and made it into a great product.
But you have to have the fundamental invention, innovation in the first place.
And the innovations are invariably government funded.
So you get the government funded innovation, government funded research, and then you get the great companies like Apple who come along and take that.
But they wouldn't have done the research to invent those technologies in the first place.
Okay, so what you're saying is that an MP3 player came out of government technology?
Well, it did because it was a microchip, which was a government technology, but that's...
I don't want to get into...
MP3 technology started in Germany in 1987.
I'm not even going to try and pronounce...
They started a research program for coding music with the high quality and low bit rate sampling at its institute.
The project was controlled by an expert in mathematics and electronics.
Karl-Heinz Brandenburg.
Based upon his 10-year-long experience in music compression, he invented MP3 players.
He completed the project in less than two years.
So that came out of a private company.
No, of course not, but the technology that was based on was publicly funded.
Oh yeah, you know what, you're right, because it's true, because when they delivered The MP3 players to the stores, they used government roads, and therefore the government is responsible for MP3 planning.
Anyway, I feel like we've exhausted the limits of the discussion.
I certainly do appreciate the conversation, though.
It's always stimulating.
I just come back to the...
I think that there's interesting praxeological or economic arguments, but I think most fundamentally it's just about the ethics, you know?
I mean, I don't care if the government thinks they know who I should date.
I'm going to ask my own women out, so...
I appreciate that.
Can I ask you one more thing?
Can I ask you one more thing?
And I totally agree with you on this.
So I think that, for example, say, for example, you've got two percents of society.
I'm sorry, what?
You see, you've got two halves of society.
A certain percent wants to remain part of the state voluntarily.
And a certain percent wants to leave the state.
Now, I totally accept your right to leave the state.
And I would say that you would set up a certain part of the country and let people go live there completely free.
But there still has to be the fundamental, I mean, you can't leave the state and still reap the benefits of the society.
So, I'm not talking, I don't want to get into the diagnosis, you can't use roads or whatever, but the state has actually set up the society we live in.
So say they were to To take a part of Canada and say, right, whoever wants to go live there for free is more than happy to go live there for free.
But you're still not going to be able to access things that have been socially funded.
So how'd you get around that problem?
I'm not sure what you mean, I wouldn't be able to access things that have been socially funded, like what?
Well, how could you say, I don't want to be part of the state anymore, I don't want to pay tax anymore, but I want to reap the benefits of the infrastructure that's been put together?
No, no, no, I'm not asking you to restate exactly what you said.
What I'm asking you is, let's say that the province Ontario becomes, and Kapistan, right, becomes an anarcho-capitalist society, right?
Yeah.
And so what are you talking about in terms of benefits, right?
So the roads are all privatized and everything's privatized and all that.
And what are you talking about in terms of benefits that I would not be able to access?
How would you be able to set up there?
You'd have to set up somewhere that wasn't built in social infrastructure.
You couldn't say we're going to...
But you can't turn around and say that we're going to take this part.
Are you saying you can't privatize things?
I don't understand what you mean.
No, there's nothing about privatisation.
You're now talking about completely gone off.
You can't take a part of a society and decide that you're just going to take it.
I mean, it's been built and funded and socially constructed.
I'm still not sure what you're saying.
Are you saying that because the communists built roads in Russia that no capitalist could ever be allowed to use those communist roads, even though communism was an evil and destructive system, you can't Use those things?
I don't understand.
You can't privatize them?
I'm not a communist.
No, I'm saying that if you were to turn around and say, right...
No, no, no, no.
Stay with me.
You keep going on up on other things.
I'm asking about communism.
Are you saying that they should not have privatized the communist industries or the systems or anything like that?
Well, it was the government that did that.
If you want to...
No, no, but they sold it to private interests.
Right, so if you want to leave, at least you're going to buy them out.
Fair enough.
But if you want to leave, you've got to appreciate that it's not going to be a vast majority of society that's going to with you, unless, of course...
No, no, no.
We're changing.
Now you're talking practicals.
Well, first of all, the people have paid for these things.
The government has paid for nothing.
The government pays for nothing.
The government has no money.
The government pays for nothing.
The government can own nothing.
The people have already paid for everything.
And if the people want to take it, they've already paid for it.
They owe nothing to the government because the government doesn't exist.
It's a bunch of sociopathic liars who cheat and steal and brutalize the population.
And if the slaves want to take back the plantation, I'm not sure that they should really care that much about the property rights of the plantation owner, even though he actually did pay something with his own money.
The government is a lie.
It owns nothing.
There's no such thing as socially funded.
The government has stolen stuff and built stuff.
And it's the people who've paid for it already.
Yeah, the people, yeah.
So if the people want to contribute and live, I mean, the minute you go by the individual, the minute you go by the one, then you're constructing a society.
Whether it's your family, your family, your close friends, you're already starting to construct a society where we live together.
I mean, we have to realise that if we're going to share an area, then we do have to come together and work together and have things like laws where I'm not going to drive about 150 miles an hour because even though I would think I might like driving fast, I'm going to be putting other folk in danger and then my rights are going to start in front of stuff.
I mean, that's the order born in Germany where accident rates are very low.
There's no speed limit.
There are roads in Holland where they've gotten rid of all road signs, all speed limits, all speed bumps, all lanes, and accident rates have dropped enormously.
I don't know what the best way to organize society is, and you don't either.
You don't know if you need laws, the way that they're currently constituted.
You don't know if people can or cannot be allowed to drive 150 miles an hour.
I have no idea, and neither do you.
That's why we need a free society.
Well, you're right.
I'm not going to claim to know all these things.
I mean, what we have to do is we actually have to sit down and discuss things and work out together how we want to live and cooperate with each other.
Exactly.
Wonderful.
And we should do that through negotiation and peaceful means, not through people grabbing control of the massive guns of the state and training them on everyone else to get them to obey.
That is not working together.
That's working together like slaves or entrepreneurs.
It's just not the way that that relationship works.
All right.
I've got one more call to go through, so you asked me the last question.
I'm going to have to move on, but I really appreciate the call, Brian.
Thanks so much.
Thank you very much.
And Mike, who's up last?
All right.
Last on the show.
Wow, we're saying that two shows in a row.
I'm telling you.
Working on it, baby.
Last on the show today is Taiwan.
He wrote in and said, when starting a relationship with someone that you know you guys live with...
What the?
We can still hear you, Brian.
We're going to use that government-funded mute button.
Mike, it's my job to go with the listeners.
We talked about this.
I am trained.
I have the armband.
Just kidding.
Go ahead.
Right.
Taiwan wrote in and said, when starting a relationship with someone that you know you want to have kids with, which aspect do you think is more important over the other?
The aspect of procreation and the continuation of the human species that will hopefully result in the generational changes in intelligence, being more peaceful, having empathy, and so on.
Or the aspect of compatible personalities between you and the person you are dating?
Do you think that if your personality doesn't mesh with the other person, at least in a nice and homogenous manner, will it create an environment that will negatively affect the child, even if both parents are dedicated to peaceful parenting?
The reason why I'm asking is I recently started dating a woman who I think will be a good parent for various reasons.
Perhaps I could be wrong about this.
But I ran into some potential red flags that I think might become problematic during the post-child rearing phase of life.
What do you think is a good approach for drawing the line between satisfying own selfish desires versus satisfying the evolutionary biological imperative of creating more, smarter, and peaceful generation of kids?
What is your personal experience when you met your partner?
Can you share your thoughts about where you drew the line for yourself?
That's from Taiwan.
What are the red flags?
Forget about me.
What are the red flags?
Hello?
I'll start with the red flags, I guess.
So when I first started on our first dates, the first thing I noticed was It was her body language, obviously.
And when I looked at how she was walking towards me, she had like a scratched back and just looking down.
And then she looked very shy.
And I immediately thought that, you know, this is someone that I'm going to have a little trouble, you know, being spontaneous with.
And then just because of the body language.
It basically limits my ability to be in the moment and then spontaneous because I'm going to be consciously thinking about her body language, I think.
So why are you interested in a...
I'm not saying you shouldn't be.
I'm just curious then, why are you interested in a relationship with this woman?
Yes.
No, why are you interested in a relationship with this woman?
Oh, why am I? That's a good question.
I mean, I guess the reason is I want to find a life partner that I can spend my life with.
Raising children is also a priority in me.
Not answering the question.
Sorry, you're not answering the question.
Why do you want this job?
Well, I'd like some money.
It's like, why do you want this job?
Not why do you want a job.
Not why do you want a partner, but why do you want this woman?
Well, okay.
Why do I want one?
No, no.
Not one.
Why do you want a woman?
Why do you want this woman?
This woman.
Okay.
So, I guess to answer that, I think...
When I, when I, during the day when I asked her the question, you know, what was her, what was your childhood like?
You know, she didn't, she didn't like freak out or shrieking hard and then just run away from the restaurant.
And that, that I've had in the past bad experiences when I asked that question.
Right.
And so that's, that's one reason that I can think of.
Because I think she, um, Values, the importance of those kind of questions.
Okay, so she didn't freak out when you asked her about her childhood.
And what else?
It's really hard to tell because I've only been with a couple of dates with her and still trying to get to know her.
So I... Okay, what if I told you that you know everything there is to know about her already?
Really?
yeah really then so if you had to make a decision I'm not saying you should just a possibility right But if you had to make a decision now, Taiwan, what would you decide?
Decide?
You want to spend the rest of your life with and have children with.
Well, that's what I'm trying to...
That's what I'm figuring out right now.
I mean, I... No, no.
I said if you had to choose now.
If I had to choose now?
Yeah.
I can't choose now because I don't have all the information.
But if somebody said you have to say yes or no, you would say no, I would assume, because you wouldn't feel confident enough to say yes, right?
Yeah, that's right.
That's true.
Okay.
And you've had how many dates with her?
Four.
Four dates.
And each date lasts, what, two or three hours?
No, first date was like four hours.
Second date was like a whole day.
Third and fourth date, she just came over to my house for two weekends.
Wait.
Your fourth date, she came over to your house for two weekends?
Yes.
That seems like more than a date.
Uh...
No, it was just a date.
I mean, nothing happened.
Did she come over for the whole weekend?
Yeah, I asked her if she wanted to.
So she slept over?
Yeah.
In a different bed?
Yes, in a different bed.
So she slept at your house on your third date or fourth date?
Third date.
So on your third date, she sleeps over at your house and...
But you didn't have any sex, you're saying, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Okay, do not marry this woman, in my humble opinion.
That's all I need to know.
Really?
Why do you say that?
I'm just curious.
Gosh, I don't exactly know how to verbalize it, so forgive me if I stumble around a little bit.
Okay.
You've kissed, I assume?
At the last date, just a quick pack, just a small pack before she left.
So she's sleeping in your house.
It's a romantic situation.
You're not sleeping together.
It just seems like a lack of boundaries and a lack of self-protection.
Does she know you well enough to sleep in your house?
Does she know you safely enough?
I mean, I'm not saying you're some crazy guy.
I assume you're not, right?
I'm telling you this, if my daughter said, well, you know, this guy wants me to come and sleep over at his house on the third date, what do you think I'd say?
No way.
Why would I say no way?
Because there's no way you can know someone that well before you do something like that.
Well, yeah, if you know them well enough that you're going to go and sleep at their house...
Then you obviously know them very, very well.
Or at least you feel very, very safe and secure with that.
So either she's like an incredibly great judge of character, or she just does what people want her to do.
And she doesn't have people in her life saying, are you crazy?
You can't go and sleep over at guys' houses when you haven't even kissed them yet.
Right, that does sound a little off now that you say it like that.
And it doesn't mean she's a bad person, it just means that she doesn't have common sense.
She doesn't have good judgment, and she doesn't have people around her who are telling her anything that, like...
And she did it twice, right?
No, just once.
What do you mean twice?
Sorry, I thought you said that there were two weekends that she stayed at your house.
No, no, no.
Two days.
Sorry.
Oh, two days.
Two days.
Have you guys arranged another date since then?
Yeah, I did.
We did.
Okay, so what that means is that she is telling her friends and family that she spent the night at your house on your third date.
Right?
Now, so either she is telling her friends and family or she's not.
Do you know if she is or isn't?
Not sure.
I have to ask her about that.
Okay, but logically we can work through this, right?
Okay.
So logically, if she did tell her friends and family that she thought it was a great idea to go and sleep over to Guy's house on the third date when they've never kissed, and they're like, yeah, that's great.
I think that's wonderful.
I hope you have another date with him, in which case she's surrounded by people who have the judgment of a gopher, right?
Yeah.
I'm sorry, that's probably quite negatively speaking of gophers, but...
But she's surrounded by people who just don't have the common sense God gave a goose, right?
Or she's not telling them.
She's not telling her friends and family about her decisions, in which case she is incredibly isolated from social feedback.
So either the social feedback she's getting is insane or she's not telling people what she's doing and she's keeping secrets and she's hiding things, which is not a good sign.
I think two is the likely scenario, the second scenario.
Right.
Now, this must have been a very sexually charged situation.
I'm not saying that you were, obviously you say you kissed and pecked on the cheek later, right?
But sleeping at a guy's house in a romantic situation before you've even kissed on the cheek is way out of order, right?
Okay, okay.
Right?
I mean, that's like the shark's head getting blown up at the beginning of Jaws, right?
It's just way out of order, right?
And it is.
It's just way out of order.
And it's a sexually charged situation.
And it means that she's willing to put herself...
Look, you're a nice guy and all that, but, you know, women should be a little careful, right?
I mean, if she's not even secure enough to kiss you, what the hell is she doing sleeping next door to you?
Actually, I did ask her about that because that kind of worried me because on our second date, I asked her, we met at a park, and weren't you worried about coming to see me, like driving like two hours just to see me?
And she's like, well, yeah, in our first date, I was worried, so that's why I picked the public place.
But she said that I got to know you better and you seem like a good guy, so that's why.
That was her reasoning.
Right, okay.
Okay, and it's a long drive and all that, but if she wants to stay over the weekend, why doesn't she just get a motel room or something, right?
Right, yeah, that should have, okay.
No, and I'm just thinking, this is the way that you can judge women, because, listen, you're sexually charged up by this woman, right?
Right.
And that means that you're dicknapped, which means that you've been kidnapped by your penis.
I've often wondered, just between you and me and everyone else, why do women think that men are dumb?
You look around the world and Not a lot of tit imprints on the genius of the species, right?
I mean, most of the stuff that women use and love are invented by men.
So why do women think that men are idiots?
And I think I finally figured it out.
Okay, what is the answer?
The answer is that when we're around women, we kind of are.
Oh yeah, because of hormones and stuff.
Because the hormones and literally a man's brain gets shut down like a meteor hitting a power grid of Los Angeles.
The whole grid goes down.
Which does not speak too well to the quality of women's souls that the man's brain has to shut down to find them sexually attractive.
But who am I to argue with evolution?
That's just what's happened, right?
So women think that men are stumbling, mumbling idiots because around women we generally are.
And since they don't really see us in the lab, you know, bringing Frankenstein to light with the glory of our electricity, right?
They don't see this inspiration.
They just see guys stumbling around hoping to get to first base, right?
So, from a woman's view, they must look at men and say, how the hell did these bumbling doofballs end up in charge?
And that's because when we're around women, Blood goes south, and idiocy heads to the North Pole, right?
And this is just a complete tangent, right?
I just sort of wanted to point out that I finally figured out why women think that we're such idiots, because they see us when we're attracted to them, and that's what we look like, and I can't blame them for that.
I can't either.
Right?
Right.
And so the way that you fight that is you say, okay, if this was my daughter, right, because that takes the sexual element out of things, right?
So you say, okay, if this was my daughter, my daughter phoned me up and said, yeah, I want to stay over at this guy's place overnight.
We haven't kissed.
You knew exactly what you would say, right?
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
Definitely.
Right.
But your penis is like, whoa, egg proximity.
Can we get an egg under some covers?
I mean, that's how they bake, I think.
I'm not sure.
But if we can get some egg under some covers nearby, we might get access to that egg later.
I feel like I kind of have this desire to rationalize my way out of what you said to me.
Of course you do.
Yeah, yeah, no, listen, your sperm is saying, like, don't listen to that bald motherfucker on the internet.
We want some eggs.
Get us some eggs.
Get us some eggs.
We want to make some more sperm in about 20 years, so get us some eggs.
Don't listen to this guy.
He's cock-blocking you, and just stay away, right?
Let's say it was an elderly, overweight Scottish man.
No, no way.
You've met a few times and he's like, oh, I'd love to sleep in the next room.
And I like haggis and broccoli for breakfast.
Right?
I mean, you would be like, dude, you know, seriously?
No, come on.
Right?
But now you're like, right?
So it's like, yeah, that's legit.
Sounds great.
Egg proximity, I'm down.
Old farty Scottish guy, I'm not down.
Eggs, I'm down.
Hmm.
Where do I hang my kilt?
Sorry?
Before the date, I watched your video about marriage and relationships.
It's the one where you film outside in a park in front of all these trees or something.
Yeah, yeah.
And we immediately talked about what we wanted in relationships, and we both want the same goals, like having kids and then getting married in the future and so it was very serious going in and I feel like that seriousness aspect is what well I'm not saying like what she chose
to do like sleeping over was a good idea but I'm saying like that may have think that it was okay you know Yeah, well, I mean, so the fact that you don't want to have kids?
Okay, okay.
That narrows it down to you and approximately 98% of the rest of the humanity, right?
That's true, yeah.
Want to get married?
Okay, maybe 96%, right?
I mean, that's not two legs, ten toes, you know?
I mean, let's keep whittling it down here, right?
One nose.
Yeah, okay.
Unless you're into more.
So, this is not, you know, this is not a big filter, right?
Carbon-based, breathes oxygen, has pulse, right?
Right.
I mean, this is not.
Not the most discriminatory approach to things, right?
Well, you know, asking like specific questions about, you know, their past and Just showing the other person virtues like honesty and stuff, that can also serve as filter.
Oh yeah, listen, I get all of that.
I get all of that.
And all you're trying to do is get your penis closer to the eggs by throwing up a smokescreen of bullshit to me, right?
Okay, if we throw the bullshit at Steph, can I slither closer to the eggs?
Is that okay?
Can we do that?
Can I squirt?
Can I go?
Right?
And I get that.
And look, I mean, obviously you can do whatever the hell you want.
I'm just giving you my opinion, right?
My opinion is that if this woman is saying what she's doing with you and people aren't saying, what the hell are you doing?
Are you crazy?
Then either people around her have bad advice or she's hiding what she's doing from people.
That's not good science.
Because if she's hiding what she's doing with people, it means that she knows what she's doing is going to be very disapproved of and she's not giving people the capacity to honestly disagree with her.
People who hide stuff, it's gross.
Because they're not giving you the opportunity to have an honest disagreement, right?
Right.
It's very manipulative, right?
I don't think she was hiding.
What do you mean?
I don't know.
She's gone for a night.
She's not sleeping at home for a night.
Would her friends and family not know about that at all?
I mean, do they not need to know where she is in case there's an accident?
I don't mean you kill her, obviously, right?
I mean, if she drives into a ditch, wouldn't she want to know, like, look, if my daughter is going to go drive someplace and stay with some guy, I'd like to know where she is.
I mean, I don't know if this woman's 40 or something, but I'm just saying, right?
You sound like a young guy.
So I wouldn't mind knowing where she is, and I certainly wouldn't expect her to hide it from me.
Yeah, I think she did tell her family, but their family just has a bad judgment.
Giving good advice or character giving good advice.
So she has bad advice.
She has bad judgment.
Yeah, and me too.
I didn't know about this either.
No, no.
Listen, man.
You don't have bad judgment.
You have no judgment because you're dicknapped.
Okay.
And I know this sounds terribly sexist and you're still responsible for what you do, which is why I'm glad you called in and glad we get to talk about this.
But there's a reason why men point the penis and women say yes or no.
Because men are the huntress and women are the gatekeepers.
It's the way biology works.
Don't blame me.
Get mad at Mother Nature.
I agree with that, yes.
So you are going to be like, you know, again, maybe you come from an R-type background to go back to the gene war stuff.
I don't know.
But you're going to be like, okay, well, Where can I plant my seed?
And the women are going to be like, nope, nope, nope, nope, yes, right?
And the moment the woman says yes, you're going to head in that direction.
This is in general for the most, right?
There's exceptions in this, that, and the other, right?
Well, no, Steph, I don't think I was dicknapped.
This is the first relationship I've ever had in my life, and I've only had a handful of dates before her.
Wait, this is an argument against being dicknapped?
I'm sorry, what?
I mean, this is the first food I've had in nine weeks.
I think I'm still very discriminating about what I'm going to eat.
Nope.
No, you're not, right?
This would be an argument as to being dicknapped now because...
And again, I'm not saying this is a bad woman, right?
She's not, like, got human skulls in a bikini, right?
Although...
Anyway, no, let's come back to that later, right?
But I mean, I'm not saying she's like some terrible woman or anything like that.
But what I'm saying is that if you have not had a sexual relationship before, then if this is in the vicinity, then you're backed up, right?
So the way that she's treating others is the way she's going to treat you.
Other people cannot trust her if she's not telling them the truth about what she's doing, right?
And what if it was scenario A? What if people around there just gave bad advice?
Then you're marrying into a whole idiot, low-wisdom gene pool, or you're gonna get married into somebody who's a real exception from her family, right?
So then she's smart and they're not smart, or she's wise and they're not wise, And does she know that?
Yeah, she does.
Oh, she knows that her family gives really bad advice?
Yeah.
I didn't say exactly like that, but she talked about how abusive her mother was and all that.
So she knows what's good and bad from a basic standpoint.
So she comes from an abusive past, and how was she abused?
Um...
Well, neglected by her father, and then he remarried twice, I think.
She doesn't have a very good relationship with her stepmom, and they never talk about anything serious.
Wait, what happened to her bio mom?
I'm not sure.
What?
She didn't really talk about her that much.
No, no.
I didn't say that.
I didn't say what were the details.
I said what happened to her biological mother?
Did she vanish or did she die?
She vanished.
So her biological mother left her?
You know, I would have to ask her that.
Sorry, I don't have the details for that.
See, that's an important detail to have before a woman sleeps in your house.
Because, you know, she might not be the only one in potential danger, right?
No, and listen, listen, the reason I'm saying this is that, and I'm not saying this is likely, right?
But the reason I'm saying this is, you know, let's say she's just some crazy woman.
And she comes from a pretty disturbed background, right?
Right.
Neglected, father married twice, you don't know what the hell happened to the mom, but not close, abused by the stepmom and all this, right?
Right.
I mean, what if she wakes up in the morning and tries to have sex with you and you reject her and she goes crazy and claims that you raped her?
Yeah, that...
I'm not saying it's likely and I'm not trying to freak you out and say this is right, but this is a...
I mean, this is a woman who's come from a disturbed background and that doesn't mean that you can't have a relationship.
I mean, I had a screwed up background and I'm happily married, but the question is what has she done about it?
Has she gone into therapy?
Has she done a lot of self-work?
work?
Has she figured stuff out?
I think she thought about it.
I'm telling you, if she was abused and has not done self-work, you do not want to do that.
I know your penis is like, hey, crazy egg is better than no egg.
No, it's not.
No, see, crazy egg comes with the government, comes with lawyers, comes with restraining orders, comes with child support, comes with alimony, comes with false rape allegations.
You do not, like, no egg is infinitely better than crazy egg.
I don't care what your genes are telling you.
I'm talking about your heart and your balls, right?
Yeah, thank you for that.
And if she was abused as a child, and this is more than just like, you know, my mom watched TV sometimes when I wanted to play with her, this is some more serious stuff, right?
And you don't even know some of it, right?
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't really know any details.
Okay.
Well, I know one detail.
Yeah.
Sorry, go ahead.
Can I tell you about it?
Okay.
So she told me that when she was around seven, I think, or I think it was seven or ten, like, I can't exactly remember.
But she also had a stepsister who was in the same room with her.
And when she wanted alone time, she would just hide in the closet for hours and then just stay there.
And she considered it her safe space because no one could bother her.
And she contrasted that with her brother having his own room.
And then when he wanted his own space, then he could just, you know, close the door and then his room would be his own space.
But, you know, she said she had her own closet.
And that just didn't feel right with me when she said that.
No, no.
The question is, how did she say it?
How did she say it?
What do you mean?
What I mean is, did she say, like, well, okay, this is what I did because it made sense and, you know, this is how I got my own space.
Oh, yeah, exactly like that.
This is what I did and it made sense.
So nonchalant without, like, I had to hide in a closet to get any kind of boundaries, right?
Didn't I say this is a woman who lacks boundaries?
Yes.
And she was in a place where she had to hide in the closet to get any kind of boundary, right?
Wait, so lacking boundaries and hiding in the closet?
I don't understand the connection.
Well, it means that she didn't have boundaries in her family, so the only way she could get any boundaries was to hide in the goddamn closet.
In other words, they didn't respect her boundaries to the point where she could be in a house with other people and not in the closet and still have boundaries.
Okay, right.
Thank you for that insight.
I mean, I had to go and hide in a tree house when I was a kid.
Oh, really?
I'm sorry.
Because I couldn't be home and not be, like, overwhelmed with crazy people.
So she had to hide in a closet.
I had to go to a tree house.
It's because I don't have to do that at my house.
If I need some quiet time, I say, listen, guys, I need some quiet time.
That's respected.
Mm-hmm.
I don't have to go and hide in the backyard.
I don't have to go on the roof, right?
Yeah, I mean, I told her that I was going to start...
We agreed to be exclusive on our second date, and I don't know how to proceed from there.
What do you mean you don't know how to...
Because we talked about a lot of personal stuff with each other.
It just doesn't seem very easy to just end it on the spot.
End what on the spot?
Oh, and the relationship?
Yeah.
Well, look, I don't know about that.
I don't know, but it should be hard, right?
Because if you get involved, and again, I'm just telling you what my thoughts are.
Your choice about the relationship remains your own, right?
But it should be hard to break it off if you get too intimate too quickly, if you get in too deep before evaluation.
Because if she's had a traumatic history and she's not done anything about it and she's speaking about the elements of this trauma in a nonchalant way, that to me is indicative of just being spaced out, just being dissociated, just not having processed what has occurred in her history and combine that with the lack of judgment that's staying over with you and your lack of judgment staying over with her, right?
I know from the ACE, like you had with childhood experience, your parents are divorced, her parents are divorced, you found a woman Whose parents are divorced and you guys rushed into things, right?
Yeah, exactly.
You really jumped in at the deep end and it is tough to extricate yourself from that.
It is.
And it should be because that's why you don't do it, right?
If it was easy to get out, then you'd bungee in and bungee out, right?
And if you were a less kind man, then you might have made a move with her when she was at your place overnight, right?
Right.
But it is hard to get out if that's what you want to do.
It is hard to get out once you've gone in deep very quickly without boundaries, right?
So going deep and quickly.
So is there anything wrong with sharing a lot of...
Do you think that there's anything bad about going deep quickly?
not like having sex right away or after a couple days or something like that but actually talking about personal stuff and sharing past experiences and stuff No I think that's fine I think that's important.
You don't want to talk about news and the weather because you're trying to get to know each other.
But my issue Is that you were both talking about deep stuff, but you weren't listening to each other.
Okay.
I was listening.
Do you get what I mean?
Yeah, I was listening, but I didn't know if it was bad or not until you were telling me.
Right.
Listening, because you knew, right?
So the question is, when people are telling you about sad things...
What do you feel?
Now, my guess is that when she was telling you about the closet, you didn't have very strong feelings about it.
Yeah, yeah, and I told her, okay, that really feels, I feel really weird now.
I was telling her this, and we just kept talking about it for like 20 minutes after she told me that.
But the weirdness is because she's not processing any emotions about it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So she's saying it in this matter-of-fact kind of way.
You know, oh yeah, and then the shark came and bit my leg off right above the knee, and then, you know, and then I went for an ice cream.
And it's like, whoa, right?
I mean, you've heard this happen on this show a million times.
There are people that are talking about really beautiful stuff, and they're giggling, or they're laughing, or they're completely dissociated, or whatever, right?
And that means that they don't have...
They just have not emotionally accessed and processed what happened to them.
Nothing wrong with that as a natural defense mechanism and so on, right?
But what I mean by is you need to listen to yourself while you're listening to other people.
People try and space me out all the time.
So if somebody's telling me something traumatic and they're giggling, my experience, I get irritated after a while.
I feel sympathetic, right?
But after a while, I'm like, stop conditioning my response.
Stop inviting me to giggle at something that's traumatic.
Stop trying to control my emotional apparatus.
Stop trying to manipulate me.
And I'm not saying it's conscious.
It's what happens anyway, right?
And so I get annoyed at people because they're telling me this traumatic stuff and they're giggling about it.
And that's a way of disorienting me, and it's a way of controlling, attempting to invade and control my emotional apparatus by telling me something that's tragic and then demanding that I laugh at it.
It's a way of attempting to replicate the same dissociation that they're experiencing in me by providing me contradictory stimuli.
Sad story, let's laugh.
So if you listen to yourself while you're listening to someone else, really listening to someone else, like, wait a minute, you just told me something really sad there, but you don't seem to be sad and I don't know what I'm experiencing.
I feel kind of spaced out.
That's what I mean by listening to yourself while you're really listening to someone else.
Okay.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I'm going to have to listen back to that and then process it thoroughly.
Yeah.
Well, okay, so she says, I had to hide in a closet to get away from my half-sister.
Right?
That's sad, right?
And she says, you don't even know where the hell her mom is, and she's got a stepdad who's remarried twice.
That's sad stuff, right?
It's tragic.
Really tragic stuff.
It's heartbreaking stuff.
And when you were listening to her Did you experience that sadness?
Did you really get just how tragic that was?
No.
That's what I'm saying.
She's telling you tragic stuff, but you don't experience it.
And then to really listen to someone is to say, wait a minute, you're telling me all this tragic stuff, but it feels like there's no emotion here.
If you were an actor, I would fire you.
No, seriously, like if you wrote that as a script, like this woman telling the story about all these divorces and dad remarried twice and had to hide in the closet, right?
And if that was a monologue on the stage and you were going for an Oscar, you wouldn't be mouthing it like you were reading off a recipe in a foreign language, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, life, once more, with feeling, right?
Mm-hmm.
And so, if somebody is a bad actor in their own tragedy, that's important to know.
And it's important to experience that they're not experiencing something.
And you know that.
And this sounds really complicated, but it's just really being in touch with your own feelings when you're in the presence of someone else.
And letting your feelings inform you without enclipsing the other person.
You're saying the sad stuff.
You don't seem sad.
I feel spaced out.
Like, what's going on?
This is a tragic story.
Yes, I should have been like that.
Well, you were, but you just don't have experience in that kind of honesty.
Now, that's intimacy.
Telling your sad stories is not intimacy, right?
There are tons of people who will walk right up to you and tell you all their sad stories, right?
I know.
Oh, my God.
That is not intimacy.
I need to hear that.
That's called the blarp.
I call it a blarp, which is just this big emotional dump, except it's usually not emotional.
It's just this big information dump about sad things.
So telling people your sad stories is not intimacy.
Really being connected with your emotional experience of someone else and communicating it to them in real time, in the real time relationships idea, that to me is intimacy.
Thank you for that stuff.
I really appreciate it.
You are very, very welcome.
I want your penis to get the good stuff.
And there's a podcast on this 2832 emotional dumping, the dangers of taking empathy hostages.
That's important.
The other thing too is when someone else is telling you their sad story, do you feel like you can speak honestly or not?
That's an important thing as well.
Or do you feel like you're somehow lost in?
Oh yeah, I feel like I can do that, yeah.
Okay, good, good.
So yeah, that to me would be real.
Real intimacy.
And when you have real intimacy, you don't feel the need to rush.
You guys were rushing because you were trying to cover over something, you were trying to race past something.
People who want to sell you something that's kind of shoddy, they talk really fast, right?
We aren't really rushing on the sexual aspect, because I asked her...
No, no, I get that you haven't even kissed, a peck on the cheek.
I get that you're not rushing.
But what you are doing is you are both recreating a boundary-less situation.
Okay.
In that she's sleeping over before you've even kissed, right?
Uh-huh.
Can you go back to that people don't want to take it slow or fast or something like that?
Okay, so why would you be rushing certain things in the relationship, like sleepovers, right?
Why did I do that?
Who suggested the sleepover?
I did.
You did.
Okay, why did you suggest a sleepover?
Because it's a two-hour drive and we can only meet on the weekends because we both work on weekdays and The weekend is the only time that we can meet.
Well, not the only time, but it's the perfect time.
That's not causal in a sleepover.
Because you guys can meet at 10 o'clock in the morning.
She starts driving at 8.
You guys can meet at 10 o'clock in the morning.
And then she can stay with you until 9 o'clock at night, which is 11 hours.
And then she can drive home and be home by 11.
Right.
So the fact that it's a long drive is in no way causal for a sleepover.
And that 11 hours would be a pretty damn long date for the third or fourth date.
But anyway, that's not causal in the sleepover.
There's another reason why you suggested the sleepover.
No, I just wanted to spend more time.
I just wanted to spend both weekends together with her.
You can do that without a sleepover.
You both work, so you can just chip in for a motel room.
Yeah, but...
No, no, come on, man.
Be honest with me.
Be honest with me.
You suggested it because it's titillating.
It's titillating?
It's sexy.
Okay, okay.
I don't mean you wanted sex.
You probably did, but it's sexy, it's titillating, it's exciting.
Yes, it was exciting, yes.
Of course it was.
I'm a guy.
You're a guy.
Come on.
I mean, seriously.
I was concerned about her driving for too long.
I'm sorry, Stefan.
I wanted to spend more time with her.
And it's like, come on, man.
You're dicknapped.
It's titillating.
It's exciting, right?
Okay, sorry.
Sorry about that.
You're right.
No, no, it's fine.
I get it.
I know when my very balls are rolling in my shorts, like my eyes are rolling in my head.
I know, right?
Okay.
What's really going on?
Okay.
So it's titillating and it's exciting.
And the question is, why do you need that titillation and that excitement?
Because something's missing.
Because something is missing, yes.
Because you rush to titillation when you run out of connection.
And look, again, in a relationship, I'm not saying you don't have lots of sex and you don't want that sexuality.
Of course you do, and that's all fine, right?
The question is, why do you want the titillation that early?
Um...
Because what's missing is her emotional connection to her history and your emotional connection to yourself and her when you're with her.
Because you've got this dissociation from each other and this distraction from each other, this separation from each other because of a lack of emotional connection.
The void that rushes into distance is titillation.
Isn't that the decadence?
When people stop feeling, they start overstimulating themselves with violence and sex and all this sort of stuff, right?
I don't have a good script, so I need a Shit ton of CGI, right?
Yeah, okay.
I feel like because we've been avoiding sex, I thought that I was on the right track, but apparently I'm completely wrong.
Well, the titillation was quite consuming, right?
I mean, did you sleep well that night?
Yeah.
Wait for the footsteps in the hall?
Yeah, I mean, it was okay.
Thanks.
I mean, I guess it wasn't really...
It might have seemed exciting to me at first, but after it happened, it just...
Whatever.
I just got over it, you know?
Right.
Look, I mean, my suggestion would be, I mean, just try and have a conversation with the woman more, you know, face-to-face and all that, right?
I mean, and...
Just say, you know, let's go back a little over.
I don't know what happened to your mom.
And then when she starts talking about her mom, see how you feel.
See how I feel, okay.
See how you feel.
Do you get, is she connected, right?
Ask her if she's done anything about this trauma.
Did she read anything?
Has she ever gone to therapy?
I mean, that kind of stuff, right?
And just see what the processing is with her as a person.
Right?
When you get dicknapped, it's hard not to respond to the woman as vagina, but I'm asking you to respond to the woman as person.
And I'm not saying you're dehumanizing her.
I mean, I don't want to get all social justice warrior on you or anything like that.
But what I'm saying is, take the vagina out of the equation.
Take the eggs out of the equation.
Because the vagina is going to be taken out of the equation over time anyway.
And by that, what I mean is that it's not that you won't have sex in a long-term relationship.
You will.
And you'll have more and better sex in a long-term relationship than you ever will as a serial monogamist, right?
So long-term committed relationships, that's where the sex is.
And the best sex is.
But what I am saying is that The excitement and novelty and titillation of the vagina will be taken out of the equation over time.
Right, yeah, that'll happen.
That's going to happen.
I mean, that can't last, right?
Lust alone, we know that.
Lust alone is a drug.
It can't last.
And so, if you want to know whether a long-term relationship is going to work, take the titillation out of the equation.
By really trying to connect the woman as person rather than as egg hostage, right?
Or egg holder.
Did you have trouble with that?
Like...
It's distinguishing between treating a potential partner as someone with just eggs.
At your age, absolutely.
This is why I'm throwing this message in a bottle back through time.
I can't get to myself when I'm 24, but I can talk to you.
Absolutely.
Especially if you grew up divorced and so on, then you've got our stuff going on.
You're going to be focused on reproduction in the short term, which is why this titillation is important.
It's not going to work out well for you.
So, I mean, have more chats with the woman if you like her and she's willing to have conversations about her history.
In my opinion, it's worth having.
I think she's willing, yeah.
Yeah, well, have conversations with her and so on.
But, you know, sleepovers before you've kissed, that's...
I don't think that's the right way to do it, in my opinion.
Especially if there's not this emotional connection.
If there's an emotional connection, I'm telling you this.
You know you're connected to a woman and that you've got a good chance to be with her forever.
If you're with her and you forget about sex and titillation because the conversation is so great and If you're in the middle of a great conversation and she says, let's stop and have sex, and you say, no, no, you're sexy, I love sex, I want to finish this conversation.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Do you see what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, I see it.
If the sex comes out of the conversation, great.
If the sex is in place of the conversation, not great.
Well, thank you so much, Stefan.
That was very insightful.
Really appreciate it.
I have a friend, and she'll join us for a three-way.
And you're like, no, because I'm really enjoying this conversation.
Okay, now...
Okay, not that I'm saying that she suggests a three-way, but you know what I mean, right?
I mean, whatever your fantasy is, right?
I have a mermaid squid suit, and I'm willing to drench myself in yak's milk.
And you're like, wow, I don't know how you knew that about me.
That's my number one thing.
Still rather finish this conversation, right?
Then you finish the conversation, you have the best sex of your life, right?
That's the way I think it should work.
Okay.
Alright?
Alright, thanks a lot.
You guys have a great night.
Well, thanks, Taiwan.
I really appreciate the call.
And I really appreciate you.
You know, that's a very, very frank conversation.
And I appreciate your openness in that and your willingness to talk about it.
You know, you're certainly not alone in this.
And I'm sure that there's going to be a lot of guys out there who are going to really, and women, right, who are really going to appreciate your candor in this.
Yeah, great.
Thank you so much for, you know, taking the time to talk to people like us.
Oh man, it is a huge pleasure.
A huge pleasure and a privilege.
I appreciate the trust and I'm glad that the conversation was helpful.
And do let us know how it goes.
Okay, thanks.
Have a good night.
Alright, you all have a good night too.
Close to midnight.
So, have a wonderful week.
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Appreciate everyone's support and enthusiasm for the conversation.
